I am no Puritan; I do not object to dancing or theatres, or any other amusement, but I do plead for moderation in all things, and that a girl may have time for something beside mere play. I ask it not only because their mental health must suffer, but because their physique cannot possibly stand that present strain and yet remain intact ready to bear the yet greater strain to which most women are exposed during their married life. I know only too well what an uncontrolled girlhood and unending gaieties did for me, and I am only again writing out of my own experience in the hope that I may save some few girls from the misery in store for them if they begin their fashionable life before they are eighteen and if, when they begin it, they have no moderation about it, and go from ball to ball, party to party, until their faces become thin and wretched, their bloom goes, their tempers and noses sharpen together, and they are unstrung and miserable just at the time when life demands most from them, and they ought to be as well and happy as they are miserable, nervous, and broken in spirits and in health. I actually have known one mother introduce her daughter at seventeen because the next daughter was far prettier, and she wished to give No. 1 ‘a chance’ before No. 2 appeared on the scene. Can anything be more ignoble than that? And it is to save both mothers and daughters from a similar fate to that which will overtake this couple that I am pleading for the girls; that, in fact, they may be saved from themselves by the prompt action of those who ought to be the first to shield their children from a too early contact with the world. I should myself keep a girl to regular hours until she was eighteen, but even after that, as I have shown in my last chapter, she should have employment and occupation. Until she was eighteen she should never be in bed later than 9.30, and she should always be down at 8.30, while she ought never to be allowed to go to any large dance before then. Small ones, ending at 11, should be very sparsely attended, and those not at all until she was past seventeen. When the auspicious date of her eighteenth birthday draws near, a great effort should be made to celebrate it properly. On that date a girl comes into her kingdom, accepts at your hands the sceptre of self-rule and the crown of an educated and well-guarded girlhood, and certainly some special notice should be taken of such an occasion.