Most girls whom I have known, especially most pretty, attractive, popular girls, in a co-educational institution, put a heavy drain upon their nervous energies and often actually injure their health because they hesitate to refuse any invitation from a man for fear that if they once refuse he will not ask them again, and so their popularity may wane. There is no more foolish girl than the one who does not have dignity and force and tact enough to decline an invitation which she ought not to accept, and who is willing to risk her health and her strength in order that she may save her popularity. I learned a long time ago that the girl who goes every time she is asked, and who begins to show the fact by her jaded appearance, soon loses the popularity which she was struggling so hard to maintain.

There is a prevalent kind of philosophy among girls which promulgates the idea and there is no falser one extant that though a young fellow may be a little gay during courtship, may drink too much on occasion, or gamble a little, be a little careless about keeping his word or meeting his obligations, and sow a few wild oats in stray corners, when the matrimonial noose tightens about his neck he may be quietly led back into the straightest sort of paths. I should like to make it quite clear that marriage seldom if ever reforms a man. If he changes, the process is a sadly slow one. The habits and tendencies of years are as little affected by the marriage ceremony as by one's getting any other new job. A girl should be satisfied with the man as he is when she marries him and be delighted if she is lucky enough to change him gradually into something better.

The girl who bids for attention is never popular. There is nothing that so palls upon a young man and so dampens his ardor as ease of conquest; there is nothing so stimulating of interest as indifference or difficulty of attainment. As a young woman is quite unlikely to find permanent interest in any man who is so infatuated that he comes at her beck and call, so the girl who shows eagerness loosens her hold on popularity. This is the main reason why it is often impossible for one young woman to understand why another one is unpopular; but the boy knows. The easily won girl may be chronically engaged, but she seldom marries. To the sensible, clean fellow she soon grows uninteresting, a little shop-worn, a little soiled from being tossed about.

A few months ago I had an opportunity to observe in a little country town in Italy two American girls who were attracting considerable attention. They were thoroughly artificial in manner, in speech, in complexion. They were dressed in the most extreme mode of an ultra style. Every foreigner, not to speak of every American, turned his head to look again as they passed. I have no doubt that on the whole they were modest, well-meaning girls, but their make-up was a challenge to every man they met to show them attention, and they received much that was not pleasing. In contrast to these two was a group of young women from an Ohio college whom it was my pleasure to meet during the same summer in another Italian village. They were natural, genuine, unartificial, conservative in dress and manner. They had gone everywhere in a country sometimes thought dangerous for women to travel in alone, and had had no unpleasant

experiences, because they had revealed their true character to every one they met.

If I were adviser to girls, I think I should try to let them see that the things which men often seem blind to, they ordinarily are quite well aware of; that the things they often seem most to admire they care the least for; that the convention against which they rail they do not really despise, and the indiscretions which they frequently advocate they would very much dislike to see engaged in by their sisters or by the young women with whom they associate. Natural manners, natural and refined speech, a natural complexion, a quiet self-restraint, modesty in dress, a respect for conventionalities, a low laugh, constancy in friendship - all these I have learned from my contact with men are appealing in women and ultimately win respect and admiration. If I were giving advice to girls, I should urge them to cultivate these qualities, and I should assure them that the average young fellow sees through subterfuges, recognizes artificialities, and has little respect for that which is not genuine and conventional in girls.

THE PRINCIPLE OF HABIT1

ITS ETHICAL AND PEDAGOGICAL IMPORTANCE

WILLIAM JAMES

"Habit a second nature! Habit is ten times nature," the Duke of Wellington is said to have exclaimed; and the degree to which this is true no one probably can appreciate as well as one who is a veteran soldier himself. The daily drill and the years of discipline end by fashioning a man completely over again, as to most of the possibilities of his conduct.

"There is a story," says Professor Huxley, "which is credible enough, though it may not be true, of a practical joker who, seeing a discharged veteran carrying home his dinner, suddenly called out, 'Attention!' whereupon the man instantly brought his hands down, and lost his mutton and potatoes in the gutter. The drill had been thorough, and its effects had become embodied in the man's nervous structure.'

Riderless cavalry-horses, at many a battle, have been seen to come together and go through their customary evolutions at the sound of the bugle call. Most domestic beasts seem machines almost pure and simple, undoubtingly, unhesitatingly doing from minute to minute the

1 Reprinted by permission from Psychology, Briefer Course, copyright, 1892, by Henry Holt and Co., New York.

duties they have been taught, and giving no sign that the possibility of an alternative ever suggests itself to their minds. Men grown old in prison have asked to be readmitted after being once set free. In a railroad accident a menagerie tiger, whose cage had broken open, is said to have emerged, but presently crept back again, as if too much bewildered by his new possibilities, so that he was without difficulty secured.

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It keeps the fisherman and the deckhand at sea through the winter; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the countryman to his log-cabin and his lonely farm through all the months of snow; it protects us from invasion by the natives of the desert and the frozen zone. It dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social strata from mixing. Already at the age of twentyfive you see the professional mannerism settling down on the young commercial traveller, on the young doctor, on the young minister, on the young counsellor-at-law. You see the little lines of cleavage running through the character, the tricks of thought, the prejudices, the way of the "shop" in a word, from which the man can by-and-by no more escape than his coat-sleeve can suddenly fall