Confidential Chats with Girls

by William Lee Howard

Morning is the time for all mental work if you are a high-school girl or college woman. The afternoon should be devoted to some form of mild exercise and for “low pressure” work.

Shouting, yelling and all extra efforts of the throat muscles will aid in exhausting your nervous powers, to say nothing about the unpleasant and unladylike attitude it places you in before the public. A low, sweet voice, even under excitement, is a sound pleasing to all men and a certain mark of good birth.

I need not repeat the facts about the advertised “remedies” for this trouble or that pain, for I have already warned you to let all drugs and “cures” alone as you would snakes. But there are some drinks that you should be warned against. Never take those soda water fountain’s stuff advertised as “nerve tonics.” Don’t believe the young man or boy at the fountain when he says that “Dopie” or “Bromo Tonic,” “Phosphate for your Nerves,” or “Dockine” and other similar rotten stuff will do you good and that they contain no drugs or injurious materials. Don’t believe a word of all these misleading statements. The boy or young man is there to sell, not to understand or care about your condition.

If such stomach wash and nerve destroyers contain no drugs, then what good are they? If they contain nothing but plain water charged with carbonic acid gas, then why not take a glass of plain seltzer or soda water? Supposing, for example, these advertised drinks do not contain harmful drugs—most of them do, however—they are colored and sweetened. What are they colored with? What is the chemical that sweetens them? If you really knew you would be unable to keep them down, the knowledge of how they are concocted would be revolting to you.

These restrictions do not apply to pure soda water and pure syrups, but even here you must be careful to drink only those which are pure, and only the very best drug stores are safe in this matter.

Most of the bottled drinks sold at five cents should be thrown into the sewers, and how many diseased lips do you think have touched the glasses passed around at the circus and similar shows? Those glasses containing dyed water, a little chemical acid and glucose, with second-hand lemon peel to give the appearance of lemonade, are almost as dangerous as the fangs of a viper.

Don’t dress in a loud and gaudy manner unless you wish to attract the men of loud and loose principles. The personal appearance of a girl makes a great difference in the manner she will be received. To dress in good taste and with every appearance of neatness and modesty, is essential for the girl who seeks employment or respectful attentions. Good taste in dressing simply means that a man can say that the girl was well dressed, but to save his life he could not tell just what she had on for clothes or hat. The dressing of the feet is, perhaps, the first thing a refined and cultivated man looks at. To be well and sensibly shod is always a hall mark of good birth and cultivation. The girl who wears thin shoes on a wet and cold day, the young woman who displays high-heeled shoes and thin silk stockings on a winter’s day, may attract attention, but not respect. A man well knows that if a girl wears a fur coat and low shoes on the street, she will, as a wife, be continually complaining of her indisposition, pains and altogether make his home a place to flee.

No man wants a nervous and complaining woman around his house, and a girl who thinks she is attractive on the street is not the girl who will be attractive in a home. That is, one who dresses her feet for the street in the manner they should be dressed for the house or ballroom proclaims herself a careless girl and one who is not liable to take care of her health.

You have heard much about psychotherapy, suggestion and a lot about certain Movements in church circles. These all proclaim an infallible remedy for “Nerves.” There is a lot of nonsense written about this mental method of healing the nervous and soul-sick person, and, on the other hand, there has been a lot of scoffing at it. There is more in the drilling of our inner selves than the old-time physician has been willing to admit; he has so long been accustomed to consider woman a physical being of bones, flesh and whims, that her real inner self has been sadly neglected. The consequence has been that a number of well-meaning and progressive men have taken up the treatment of troubles without understanding just what relation the gross bodily organs and nerve cells bear to this inner self which we all possess. I shall not bother you with any digression, but get at once to what you can do for yourselves in this matter.

Start early to get inside of yourself; to get at that self which so bothers you at times; the thing which makes you “feel out of sorts,” that “getting mad with yourself;” the feeling that you have not said or done just what you would like to have said or done, but which some uncontrollable impulse, at the moment, made you say and do. This is the inner self, but it belongs to all the other parts of your body; is really the best part of you and will be able to put out the best in you when you have it under full control.