Certainly Sweet Seventeen may be a most unlovely creature, and in fact she often is; a creature hard and forward, having lost the innocence and obedience of childhood and having gained nothing yet of the tact and grace of womanhood; a creature whose hopes and thoughts are all centred on the time when she shall be brought out and have her fling of flirting and fine dresses with the rest. Or she may be only a gauche and giggling schoolgirl, with a mind as narrow as her life, given up to the small intrigues and scandals of the dormitory and the playground--a girl who scamps her lessons and cheats her masters; whose highest efforts of intellect are shown in the cleverness with which she can break the rules of the establishment without being found out; who thinks talking at forbidden times, peeping through forbidden windows, giving silly nicknames to her companions and teachers, and telling silly secrets with less truth than ingenuity in them, the greatest fun imaginable, and all the greater because of the spice of rebellion and perversity with which her folly is dashed. Or she may be a mere tomboy, regretting her sex and despising its restraints; cultivating schoolboy slang and aping schoolboy habits; ridiculing her sisters and disliked by her companions, while thinking girlhood a bore and womanhood a mistake in exact proportion to its feminality. Or she may be a budding miss, shy and awkward, with no harm in her and as little good--a mere sketch of a girl, without a leading line as yet made out or the dominant colour so much as indicated. Sometimes she is awkward in another way, being studious and preoccupied--when she passes for odd and original, and is partly feared, partly disliked, and wholly misunderstood by her own young world; and sometimes she has a cynical contempt for men and beauty and pleasure and dress, when she will make herself ridiculous by her revolt against all the canons of good taste and conventionality. But after her _début_ in tattered garments of severe colours and ungainly cut, she will probably end her days as a frantic Fashionable, the salvation of whose soul depends on the faultless propriety of her wardrobe. The eccentricities of Sweet Seventeen not unfrequently revenge themselves by an exactly opposite extravagance of maturity. But though there are enough and to spare of girls according to all these patterns, the Sweet Seventeen of one's affections is none of them. And yet she is not always the same, but has her different presentations, her varying facets, which give her variety of charm and beauty.