Confidential Chats with Girls

by William Lee Howard

I spoke to you about the hands being the greatest carriers of infection. They even carry around the germs of typhoid fever. They have been found on the cleanliest person’s hands after using public toilets. On the fingers, especially.

You are safer in kissing a person who has consumption, than you are in wetting your finger to turn over the pages of a book that has been thumbed by scores of other persons. A person may have the cleanest habits possible yet be a menace to others as well as to herself.

I watched the other day a pair of young schoolgirls trying on each other’s gloves. Up to the lips would go a finger or two, then these moist fingers would clasp the glove fingers and in this way work the glove onto the hand. You all know the process better than I can describe it to you. Now supposing that the girl who owned the glove had rang the bell or turned the knob at the residence of a friend who was ill with, say, consumption, to inquire how the friend was. Don’t you see that it was more than probable that nurse, maid or mother had conveyed moist germs of the disease to the knob or bell push, that the germs dried but had not been long enough in the sun to be killed, and this girl’s glove picked these germs up and then you transferred them to your lips? Dried germs which only wanted the moisture of your lips to become virulently active.

Don’t wet your fingers in trying on gloves—new or old.

Don’t hang on to car straps with ungloved hands. The same don’t applies to water closet chains, handles and many other germ holders you will call to your mind.

In studying the peculiar habits of girls I watched a group in the “Ladies’ Hat Rooms” at a theater. They took off their hats after much pulling of big daggers—beg pardon, I mean pins—out of hair and hats. These dag—pins, were all promiscuously laid upon a dressing table covered with germ-laden dust, only to be taken up again and held in the mouth. The same process was gone through with when they again put on their hats. Pin after pin was taken from the germ cloth and put in their mouths while they adjusted the angle of their hats.

“Say, Mame, lend me a pin, will you? I’ve lost one.” So out of Mame’s mouth came a pin, which was immediately put between the lips of the borrowing girl.

Nasty? Of course. Dangerous? Frightfully so.

Don’t put pencils, pins, string and other articles of the kind in your mouths. Why does a girl think her mouth is a receptacle for every little thing she wants to use temporarily?

I have seen girls and women step up to a box office and as soon as the ticket seller had shoved, with his bare hands, a ticket or two through the window, immediately grab up those dangerous pieces of pasteboard and place them between their lips and hold them there until they passed down the line and into the theater.