I enter on this subject with a hesitation strong enough to have prevented my entering on it at all, did I not believe that to write for or concerning women, and avoid entirely that deplorable phase of womanhood which, in country cottages as in city streets, in books, newspapers, and daily talk, meets us so continually that no young girl can long be kept ignorant of it, is to give a one-sided and garbled view of life, which, however pretty and pleasant, would be false, and being false, useless. We have not to construct human nature afresh, but to take it as we find it, and make the best of it: we have no right, not even the most sensitive of us women, mercifully constituted with less temptation to evil than men, to treat as impure what God has not made impure, or to shrink with sanctimonious ultra-delicacy from the barest mention of things which, though happy circumstances of temperament or education have shielded us from ever being touched or harmed thereby, we must know to exist. If we do not know it, our ignorance—quite a different thing from innocence—is at once both helpless and dangerous: narrows our judgment, exposes us to a thousand painful mistakes, and greatly limits our power of usefulness in the world.

On the other hand, a woman who is for ever paddling needlessly in the filthy puddles of human nature, just as a child delights in walking up a dirty gutter when there is a clean pavement alongside, deserves, like the child, whatever mud she gets.