Confidential Chats with Girls

by William Lee Howard

Take a half hour at the time when you can be alone and see into yourself. Search well your heart and learn just what you said or did that you regret. Then find out what caused you to be disagreeable, what has put you out with your better self. Write these thoughts and desires down where you can privately refer to them daily. Take the first mistake and stick to the memory of it so that, when the impulse comes to repeat it, you can check yourself. Drilling yourself this way, you will soon learn to conquer this one fault. Then start in the same way at another fault and conquer that. Don’t try to exercise all the powers of resistance at once, for if you do, there are bound to be failures and too many of these make for discouragement, and then follows recklessness. You would not try to develop a weak back by going from an apparatus meant to develop the thighs to another one for the chest, and then back again for a few moments to that for strengthening the back muscles. No, you stick to the work which develops the back until you have made some decided progress. The inner self, the will, the good girl in you, should be developed in the same way.

You want to go to a dance or perhaps the theater, “all the other girls are going,” but your mother has good and sufficient reasons for not allowing you to go. Now, instead of arguing, complaining and going off to your room in a huff, saying unkind words to your good mother, words which tear and gnaw at her heart, speak to that inner self; call it out; go to your room and peer straight into the trouble with YOU, not that wrong idea that the fault is with your mother.

Think deeply of this fact; she is your mother, nothing that would add to your pleasure or advantage would she deprive you of—not for an instant. But as your mother she knows what is best for you; she may know something about the other girls, about the kind of youths going with them, she may know something about your health that is not advisable to tell you just at the moment. In your room think all these matters over; throw out that unreasonable and false self, and when you have done so, go to your mother, ask her forgiveness and also beg her to tell you her reasons.

Now that your inner self is in control, your mother will tell you confidentially her reasons, and when they are clear to you, the happiness which follows is far beyond any mere physical pleasure you can ever obtain. After a few times of this self-drilling, the obedience to your mother will be a second nature.

Still more fights with your inner self will have to follow, but one by one, you can conquer the enemy. Never become discouraged if you fail, just keep on trying and in the end you will win over all evil and wrong impulses.

A girl who disobeys her mother or father is the girl who as a wife will be divorced.

The girl who wants to “be a good Indian” will, when a woman, be a repulsive savage.

The girl who deceives her mother will deceive her husband.

All men know this fact.