The Cambria freeman. [volume] (Ebensburg, Pa.) 1867-1938, 1882-09-08
GIDDY GIRLS.
A COMPANION OF POOLS SHALL. PERIsH-A
SOLEMN wAItSISG AGAINST FILTRATION.

A COMPANION OF POOLS SHALL PERIsH-A
SOLEMN wARSISG AGAINST FILTRATION.
The following article, on an everyday sub
tect, appeared in a recent number OF the
Philadelphia Press. 1t is so full of unvarn-
iShed truth and so pregnant with food for
thou ght for indulgent mothers and fathers,
that we give it place in our columns with
the hope that some good may come to some
one from its reading
Friday night week ago, Cora Lent did
not come home to her fathers house in Peeks-
kill He was a shop keeper and auctiOneer.
with a store full of odds and ends and a
good deal of gossip. She was girl whose
skirts were still short and whose braids were
still long. Pretty, slender, quick-stepping,
a child-nOt yet siXteen-she banged her hair
over her forehead, wore her pretty cUlored
overskirt punched up, woman fashion, and
was just beginning to know young fellow
here and there in the little village and come
home at night as she pleased.
"She had no company said her mother
the next day, when COra's late hours had
lasted all through the night, and the fore
noon had brought from a neighbOr word that
she had slipped out of the backgate in the
afternoon and from the ticket agent the story
of New York ticket sold 10 her. Girls of
COTa's age are never considered to have
" company until some one man has given
the poor girl monopoly of attention and its
evil heritage Of gossip. The moving tide of
admirers whom the streets hold and who
and drop her as she nears it, are never rated
as company though from among them
come the companions of death and shame
In COra's case, when she sat for an hour on
a box at the shOp-dOOr swinging her feet as
she talked and giggled with young cOrpO-
raj from the State camp at PeekSkill, neither
father, mother nor sister checked the grow
ing intimacy or gave it thought. The fact
that it was some friend of Cora's who was
no friend OF acquaintance Of theirs, challeng-
ed no suspicion. With American girl of six
teen, not carefully nuitured, such &C Iuaint-
ance is never questioned. A young girl will
know a street directory full of Young men
before her mother interfereS The young
cOrporal's regiment. lett Friday. So did Cora,
with the starched Swiss muslin in which she
looked prettiest done up in little bundle
Last Thursday, with a blOOdleSs face and
a hard line OF two drawn about her thin lips,
Cora came back. She was tired and raven
ously hungry. For nearly a week she had
been ill-fed and shut into room on the great
East Side of New York, visited not by one
but three men. Her appetite for the bOun-
tifu meals of her fathers home had suffered,
but she had no manner OF objection TO the
rest of the episode. Her acquaintance with
her lover began after an easy fashion, and
after the same fashion continued. The young
girl did not wreck life and character and all
in one mad passion, that found her a child
and left her a woman. She had taken no
deliberate plunge into debasement, irked
and wearied by the slow tedium of the viii
and slept in the chamber of pollution as if it
all were picnic. Her going had made its
column in the papers her friends had set
the police in motion and the friend whom
she had made in a day, and who had COM
pleted her ruin in a week, sent her home
worn, tired, sleepy. not repentant, but in
the wan and silent mood of a child whose
outing is cut short and who begs for a little
more of it, as Cora longed to return TO her
lover and his friends.
Once home. pursuit ouieted. Her mother
put her daughter to bed and lay down on the
outside of the bed herself for a night of
heart broken watching. Her daughter had
wandered, not in lust nor in love, but in
sheer giggiing folly. So girls were doing
last night in Chestnut street So they will
to night on scores of streets where they stroll
in pairs, some utterly bad, some fast be-
coming so, all walking in a common track of
evil not yet astTay, with heads too light TO
know that they are on the edge of the pit,
walk about as unconscious of evil as they
are of Seemly behavior of young women.
For this is the growing, blighting evil of
American life in the tens of thousands of
families whose daughters are open to the
dangers of leisure, but enjoy none Of its pro
per safeguards, not that lust has come in
like flood of wickedness like a sea; but
that utter carelessueSs on the graveT con-
Germs of life leads young women from one
wild risk to another until wreck comes not
from full passion but in the emptiness of life
and head and heart. At every evening walk
their fortune on every picked up ac-
quaintance. It Is sheer ideness to talk TO
them but it may be that among the mothers
who should watch and do not there may be
some warned by Jennie CrameT and Cora
Lent.