"tender-minded." The tender-minded girl is one with a mind somewhat underdeveloped, saturated in sentimentality usually associated with a streak of obstinacy which is beyond parental influence. With nubility there comes to every girl a wealth of emotional endowment which is often most bewildering--indeed, it upsets some unstable organizations, while to others it is merely an intoxication. It disturbs their equilibrium, it tends to break down their inhibitions and to befog the perspectives that have been so carefully developed for them, and it not infrequently roils the water of life in which they have been floating and swimming without effort to such a degree that they constitute a problem for parent and teacher. The average girl gradually throws off these disequilibrilizing effects; and the moonlight walks in the garden, or the romantic plans to spend an idyllic life in a tiny cottage covered by a rambler rose-bush far from the madding crowd, companioned by an Adonis and the poetry of Tennyson, her extravagant protestations of love for another girl, her exuberant interest in some mystic or fantastic cult, and other concomitants of this period, are given proper valuation. She emerges into womanhood with a "head" for the intoxicating libation that wells up in her tissues, and is poured through her soul as sap wells up in a tree, even to the smallest branches preparatory to its bloom and fructification. The knowledge is borne in upon her that she can manage the new possession conformably to the canons of church, state, and society, and that the total of what has come to her at this period may be split up into qualities or possessions to which are given specific names, such as sentiment. Soon she realizes that these qualities become important assets in her display of the _ars amoris_ and they prepare the road that leads pleasantly and propitiously to the goal which shall be the fulfilment of her physiological destiny, namely, maternity via matrimony. When that gratifying stage has been reached and fulfilled she understands that sentimentality, modestly displayed, contributes largely to her success, not only in her family but in the world.