Atlanta Georgian. [volume] (Atlanta, Ga.) 1912-1939, 1912-08-09

a love age in ', ~o n'1$ and md" whether her
a girl of sixteen is capable of en-
tertaining deep and !nchanging af-
| lection
This is a hard question to answer,
for the love age in woman depends to
a great degree on race and climatic
conditions. In the tropics, where WON
en- mature early and age early, they
also love early, but among people of a
colder cline and blood sentiment is the
| flower of a late spring
Certainly in this latitude we should
not take any fourteen year old Juliet
seriously, and any sensible mamma who
caught her daughter of that age hang
| ing over the banisters whispering down
sizzling love speeches to some moon
struck Romeo would turn the forward
| little mink across her knee and give her
a good spanking. That would be about
the sort of love philtering that she
would get, and ninety nine times out Of
a hundred it would work a complete
and lasting cure.
OF course, every girl of sixteen be-
| lieves herself capable of the grand pas
sion, just as she believes herself ca
! pable of singing in grand opera, or ele-
waiting the stage, or, as one young miss
naively told me the other day she in
tended to do, of writing a great novel
that would change the nature of and
uplift every human being that read It,.
But, in reality, she is as little capable
of doing the one as the other
Possibly she may have within her a
great voice. or great talent, or a great
ability to love, but it is embryonic, un-
| developed, a promise and not finished
| performance
| To girl of sixteen her mind and
| heart are as unknown a territory to her
as Darkest Africa. She has not yet
| taken the measure of her own needs or
| her own potentialities. She has no idea
| of what she will demand of a man
| She is utterly, totally ignorant of her
self and Of life, and the curse of her
| Ignorance Is that she does not know
! that she doesn't know, but believes her
self to be all wise.
She plays with love as with a new
| and delightful toy, not knowing that it
| is thing that older people approach
with fear and trembling. She is en-
| chanted with new emotions, with the
gratified vanity of being fattered and
made love to, and she is so facile in
| imagination that she can throw the
rosy mantle Of romance that she has
woven over anything in trousers that
pays court to her.
! This is why very young girls elope
with their fathers chauffeurs, or marry
their dry-as-dust music masters, or
commit some other folly in the name of
love before they have found out what
love really is.
But whether the man that girl falls
in love with when she is sixteen will
continue to fire her fancy when she is
- or % is just as much an uncertainty
as whether she win continue TO have q
passion for strawberry jam and chew
ing gum after she gets out of the school
broom. There are some women who
never get beyond the bread and butter
stage Of existence, but most women do,
and there is nothing to which those
who have developed taste for caviar
look back with such amusement and
shuddering horror as to the man with
whom they fancied themselves in love
when they We're sixteen.
Certainly the man who marries the
girl OF sixteen takes a long shot at hap
uiuess, 70" ne has to take chances on
her changing ideals as she grows from