Still more is the direct appeal to sexual differences to be avoided in early childhood. Many foolish parents encourage the custom of having little beaux and juvenile flirtations, and even very young children are taught games in which the boy takes out a girl as his partner, and the reverse. I once saw a dear little girl about four years old put her arm affectionately around the neck of a little playmate, and her father said, "Oh, for shame, you shouldn't kiss a boy." Could he have answered her simple question, "Why not?" This is one of the important benefits of the co-education of the sexes. Brought up together in schools as in families, side by side, from early childhood, there is no false mystery about their relation. Their common life is developed, and they value each other for individual qualities. I have never found an exception to the statement by teachers of mixed schools, that there is less of nonsense, less of false sentimentality and precocious sexual attraction, than where the boys and girls are kept separate. In life as in art those characters are the finest in which the distinction of sex is recognized but not emphasized--in which the human nature preponderates over that of man or woman. In the Hercules, the masculine attributes are exaggerated almost to repulsiveness, but in the Apollo they are present, but they never intrude themselves upon our attention. Vigor, freedom, life, and action, the inspiration of genius, joy in existence, are his attributes, and while the muses are feminine, he is the god of poesy and music. So the Milo Venus has all the traits of womanhood, but not in excess, and her sweet, dignified presence reminds us that she is a goddess, and not a weak, self-conscious woman, like the Medicean image. But the type of womanhood in western Europe and America has emphasized all that is weak, all that is sentimental, all that is helpless in woman, and attenuated it to such delicate proportions as to give it a strange and unnatural charm, like the beauty of consumption. Let us recognize it as an exquisite creation of art, not of nature, as wonderful as the pouter pigeon or the saffron rose. The delicate whiteness of the complexion, scarcely tinged with pink, the fine silky hair, the fragile, willowy form, the tiny hand and foot, the languid blue eye, the soft, low voice, the sensitive nerves that shrink from every breath of heaven, and weep at every tale of woe, the slight cough that touches your compassion, the trembling step that appeals to you for help, are not these all characteristic of that fair, frail, lovely being, to whom sonnets are written and homage tendered when she is young and rich. A celebrated painter once heard a woman of this stamp commended as "very graceful." "Graceful!" he indignantly exclaimed, "weakness isn't grace! strength and agility are the conditions of grace."