If I can, by my humble efforts, stop the future mothers from suffering, worry and ill health, from bringing their daughters up in a state of criminal prudery, I shall be proof against the slings and arrows of the fast-disappearing SHAM. In these CONFIDENTIAL CHATS I tell in plain language and facts the things that, had they been told to the girls of the last generation, would have saved untold misery. It is a pity that the facts and instruction which should come from a mother and a father (due quite largely to their own ignorance), must be sought elsewhere, but this being so, I intend that these Chats shall supply what prudery and ignorance have denied the girls of to-day. WILLIAM LEE HOWARD, M.D. CONFIDENTIAL CHATS WITH GIRLS CHAPTER I HOW TO DEVELOP INTO WOMANHOOD The little buds on the rosebushes seen in the warm spring days and which later on in the early summer open to become the beautiful flowers, are controlled and governed in their development by the same laws of Nature that control your development from the little girl to a budding girl, and then into the full blossoming woman. Every living thing upon this earth is given life, growth and development under laws that are the same for the girl, the woman, the flowers, the fishes, the little birds. The supreme Power which controls us and every living being has so regulated the way man, beasts, birds, fishes and even flowers are kept on the earth for the increase and progression of the world, that by a plain understanding of these laws we can live and produce better and better men and women from generation to generation. If you will carefully think the matter over, you will soon realize that every living thing around us is the result of the mating of the male with the female. Roses marry and have little children just the same as a man and woman. The little pussy willow, which so early in the spring sends out its little babies in furry buds, had been married to a willow man the year before. The sweet grapes you eat in the autumn are the “fruit of the marriage” between a male grape and a female grape――that is, the seeds. The little chicks hovering and hiding around the proud mother hen have for their father the crowing cock.