misfortunes that can befall a woman whose circumstances lay her specially open to slander and misrepresentation is to include among her friends a gushing man of energetic tendencies, on the look-out to do her a good turn if he can, and anxious to let people see on what familiar terms he stands with her. He means nothing in the least degree improper when he puts his arm round her waist, calls her My dear and even Darling in a loud voice for all the world to hear; or when he seats himself at her table before folk to write her private messages, which he makes believe to be of so much importance that they must not be spoken aloud, and which are of no importance at all. He is only familiar and gushing; and he would be the first to cry out against the evil imagination of the world which saw harm in what he does with such innocent intent.

The gushing man has one grave defect—he is not safe nor secret. From no bad motive, but just from the blind propulsion of gushingness, he cannot keep a secret, and he is sure to let out sooner or later all he knows. He holds back nothing of his friends nor of his own—not even when his honour is engaged in the trust; being essentially loose-lipped, and with his emotional life always bubbling up through the thin crust of conventional reserve. Not that he means to be dishonourable; he is only gushing and unrestrained. Hence every friend he has knows all about him. His latest lover learns the roll-call of all his previous loves; and there is not a man in his club, with whom he is on speaking terms, who does not know as much. Women who trust themselves to gushing men simply trust themselves to broken reeds; and they might as well look for a sieve that will hold water as expect a man of the sieve nature to keep their secret, whatever it may cost them and him to divulge it.

As a theorist the gushing man is for ever advocating untenable opinions and taking up with extreme doctrines, which he announces confidently and out of which he can be argued by the first opponent he encounters. The facility with which he can be bowled over on any ground—he calls it being converted—is in fact one of his most striking characteristics; and a gushing man rushes from the school of one professor to that of another, his zeal unabated, no matter how many his reconversions. He is always finding the truth, which he never retains; and the loudest and most active in damning a cast-off doctrine is the gushing man who has once followed it. As a leader, he is irresistible to both boys and women. His enthusiastic, unreflecting, unballasted character finds a ready response in the youthful and feminine nature; and he is the idol of a small knot of ardent worshippers, who believe in him as the logical and well-balanced man is never believed in. He takes them captive by a community of imagination, of impulsiveness, of exaggeration; and is followed just in proportion to his unfitness to lead.

This is the kind of man who writes sentimental novels, with a good deal of love laced with a vague form of pantheism or of weak evangelical religion, to suit all tastes; or he is great in a certain kind of indefinite poetry which no one has yet been found to understand, save perhaps, a special Soul Sister, which is the subdued version among us of the more suggestive Spiritual Wife. He adores the feminine virtues, which he places far beyond all the masculine ones; and expatiates on the beauty of the female character which he thinks is to be the rule of the future. Perhaps though, he goes off into panegyrics on the Vikings and the Berserkers; or else plunges boldly into the mists of the Arthurian era, and gushes in obsolete English about chivalry and the Round Table, Sir Launcelot and the Holy Graal, to the bewilderment of his entranced audience to whom he does not supply a glossary. In religion he is generally a mystic and always in extremes. He can never be pinned down to logic, to facts, to reason; and to his mind the golden mean is the sin for which the Laodicean Church was cursed. Feeling and emotion and imagination do all the work of the world according to him; and when he is asked to reason and to demonstrate, he answers, with the lofty air of one secure of the better way, that he Loves, and that Love sees further and more clearly than reason.

As the strong-minded woman is a mistake among women, so is the gushing man among men. Fluid, unstable, without curb to govern or rein to guide, he brings into the masculine world all the mental frailties of the feminine, and adds to them the force of his own organization as a man. Whatever he may be he is a disaster; and at all times is associated with failure. He is the revolutionary leader who gets up abortive risings—the schemer whose plans run into sand—the poet whose books are read only by schoolgirls, or lie on the publisher's shelves uncut, as his gushingness bubbles over into twaddle or exhales itself in the smoke of obscurity—the fanatic whose faith is more madness than philosophy—the man of society who is the butt of his male companions and the terror of his lady acquaintances—the father of a family which he does his best, unintentionally, to ruin by neglect, which he calls nature, or by eccentricity of training, which he calls faith—and the husband of a woman who either worships him in blind belief, or who laughs at him in secret, as heart or head preponderates in her character. In any case he is a man who never finds the fitting time or place; and who dies as he has lived, with everything about him incomplete.

SWEET SEVENTEEN.

A vast amount of poetry has always been thrown round that special time of a woman's life when,

she is no longer a child and yet not quite a woman—that transition time between the closed bud and the full-blown flower which we in England express by the term, among others, of Sweet Seventeen. Without meaning to be sentimental, or to envelope things in a golden haze wrought by the imagination only and nowhere to be found in fact, we cannot deny the peculiar charm which belongs to a girl of this age, if she is nice, and neither pert nor silly. Besides, it is not only what she is that interests us, but what she will be; for this is the time when the character is settling into its permanent form, so that the great thought of every one connected with her is, How will she turn out? Into what kind of woman will the girl develop? and, What kind of life will she make for herself?

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