Very fair! But seriously, do you think it necessary to guard young people, in this selfish and calculating age, against an excess of sentiment and imagination? Do you allow no distinction between the romance of exaggerated sentiment, and the romance of elevated thought? Do _you_ bring cold water to quench the smouldering ashes of enthusiasm? Methinks it is rather superfluous; and that another doctrine is needed to withstand the heartless system of expediency which is the favorite philosophy of the day. The warning you speak of may be gently hinted to the few who are in danger of being misled by an excess of the generous impulses of fancy and feeling; but need hardly, I think, be proclaimed by sound of trumpet amid the mocks of the world. No, no; there are young women in these days, but there is no such thing as youth--the bloom of existence is sacrificed to a fashionable education, and where we should find the rose-buds of the spring, we see only the fullblown, flaunting, precocious roses of the hot-bed. ALDA. Blame then that _forcing_ system of education, the most pernicious, the most mistaken, the most far-reaching in its miserable and mischievous effects, that ever prevailed in this world. The custom which shut up women in convents till they were married, and then launched them innocent and ignorant on society, was bad enough; but not worse than a system of education which inundates us with hard, clever, sophisticated girls, trained by knowing mothers, and all-accomplished governesses, with whom vanity and expediency take place of conscience and affection--(in other words, of romance)--"frutto senile in sul giovenil fiore;" with feelings and passions suppressed or contracted, not governed by higher faculties and purer principles; with whom opinion--the same false honor which sends men out to fight duels--stands instead of the strength and the light of virtue within their own souls. Hence the strange anomalies of artificial society--girls of sixteen who are models of manner miracles of prudence, marvels of learning, who sneer at sentiment, and laugh at the Juliets and the Imogens; and matrons of forty, who, when the passions should be tame and wait upon the judgment, amaze the world and put us to confusion with their doings. MEDON. Or turn politicians to vary the excitement--How I hate political women! ALDA. Why do you hate them? MEDON. Because they are mischievous. ALDA. But why are they mischievous? MEDON.