 | The fiend's delight |  |
The Young Person.
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
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.
| The fiend's delight | |