We are prepared, not perhaps to prove, but to maintain, that
civilization would be materially aided and abetted by the offer of a
liberal reward for the scalps of Young Persons with the ears attached.
Your regular Young Person is a living nuisance, whose every act is a
provocation to exterminate her. We say “her,” not because, physically
considered, the Y. P. is necesarily of the she sex; more commonly is it
an irreclaimable male; but morally and intellectually it is an unmixed
female. Her virtues are merely milk-and-morality-her intelligence is
pure spiritual whey. Her conversation (to which not even her own
virtues and intelligence are in any way related) is three parts
rain-water that has stood too long and one part cider that has not
stood long enough—a sickening, sweetish compound, one dose of which
induces in the mental stomach a colicky qualm, followed, if no
correctives be taken, by violent retching, coma, and death.
The Young Person vegetates best in the atmosphere of parlours and
ball-rooms; if she infested the fields and roadsides like the
squirrels, lizards, and mud-hens, she would be as ruthlessly
exterminated as they. Every passing sportsman would fill her with
duck-shot, and every strolling gentleman would step out of his way to
smite off her head with his cane, as one decapitates a thistle. But in
the drawing-room one lays off his destructiveness with his hat and
gloves, and the Young Person enjoys the same immunity that a sleepy
mastiff grants to the worthless kitten campaigning against his nose.
But there is no good reason why the Spider should be destroyed and the
Young Person tolerated.