But then a vision of you used to rise up before me, and I used to say to myself: 'No; if I do this thing, I can never go and sit with her in her own little room; I can never look into her dear face again.'" And the thought of that young girl, the angel of her presence in the midst of the furnace, kept that young man unspotted from the world through all the gutters of Paris life.

Could not our sweet English and American girls be to their brothers what that young French girl was to hers?
But perhaps some pessimistic mother will exclaim, "What is the use of making these old-fashioned appeals to our modern girls?
They are so taken up with the delights of their freedom, so absorbed in the pleasure of cycling and athletic games, so full of manly ambitions, so persuaded that the proper cultivated attitude is to be an agnostic, and to look at God and the universe through a sceptical and somewhat supercilious eyeglass, that if we did make an appeal to them such as you suggest they would only laugh at such old-fashioned notions." I can only say that I have not found it so.

I can bear the highest testimony at least to our English girls, of whom I have addressed thousands, all over the three kingdoms.

Occasionally it has happened that maturer women have left me stranded, stretching out hands of vain appeal to them; but my girls, my dear girls, never once failed me.

Not only could I see by the expression of their faces how deeply they responded to my appeal to work out the latent possibilities of their womanhood, and be the uplifting influence to their brothers, and other young men with whom they were thrown, that a true woman can be; but they came forward in troops to take up the position I assigned to them in our woman's movement towards a higher and purer life.