Sometimes when one sees the kind of people—men and women—into whose gentle bloodless hands, into whose drab, lifeless but well-meaning existences, healthy helpless children are made to fall, it is difficult not to shudder. How good they are! How sweet is their ideal of what a child ought to be! How vigilant they are for any signs of “wickedness”! Who can submit to their Procrustean method and survive a whole, positive being? They _know_! They know what pleases God and the angels! No one is better informed than they on this subject. Honest?—no one could be more so than they. Reliable?—they could be trusted to stamp the exuberance out of a boa-constrictor! Good?—not merely good, but holy! Their mild cerulean eyes gaze beyond the child in their tender care, and towards a wonderful ideal, far away, of perfect childhood—a bright, merry, glowing angel who, preferably, would have wings on his shoulders, _à la_ Joshua Reynolds, and nothing—no nothing at all—beneath the thorax. His body might end there with advantage. That is their belief, their hope, their ambition. All human beings might end there with advantage; but above all the child, because children are so pure, so guileless, so sweet; it is such a pity that—— Luckily, robust positiveness has a tenacity and a vigour that frequently survive even the contagion of these toads with evil consciences. But how few are the survivals compared with the number that go under annually! That is why little girls survive the process more often than little boys; because, as a rule, unless attacked from the side of the body, a female’s positiveness to life is wholly and utterly unbreakable. But it is deeper, more silent, less conspicuous, less articulate than that of the little boy; therefore it more easily eludes the cerulean but very superficial glance of the negative adult. It is more unconscious and consequently less liable to betray itself in the presence of constraining influences. It manifests itself, too, in a less arresting, less annoying fashion; it appears to be “harmless.” Behold the girls that are turned out annually from convent schools or strictly Puritanical High Schools. If their tremendous positiveness had not been secret, concealed, subcutaneous, unconscious, how could it possibly have survived? Again and again I have heard the negative adult deny a passionate positive temperament in a little girl, when I saw it clearly. It is this mistake, this inability to detect a trait that is deep enough to be very far below the surface, that is alone responsible for the salvation of thousands of girls to-day. Modern man is not only less positive generally than woman, but the modicum of positiveness he possesses is also more apparent, less resisting, more self-assertive, more conscious and therefore less secret. It also manifests itself in a more obtrusive and more irritating way.[14]