Page:Side talks with girls (1895).djvu/127

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The Girl Who Uses Slang
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she should be respectful to older people—she shrugs her shoulders and announces audibly that they bore her. She doesn't care to read books unless they have what she calls "go" in them. She is familiar with the scandals of the day, as gleaned from the newspapers, and is greatly given to announcing that she doesn't hesitate to call a spade a spade. She is very pronounced in her likes and dislikes and will not endure contradiction. She doesn't trouble herself to hint for anything that she wishes men to do for her, she deliberately asks them, and it rather surprises her after a while to find that, considering her just one of themselves, a man will refuse her request. She doesn't seem to understand that while a man may be attracted by her prettiness and amused in a way by her manner, he very soon gets tired of her, for from the beginning of the world men have never loved the women who were slangy in their manners, but rather the woman who represents what a French writer calls "the eternal feminine."

The girl who is slangy in speech, dress, and manner is very apt to grow slangy in her amusements. She is best pleased by the trashiest of literature, and for a book to be advertised as not quite nice is to her a special recommendation for it. In music she selects, by preference, songs that have neither wit, melody, nor sentiment to recommend them, and which only please by their lack of sense. No