The Pernicious Peaches whereof we speak are never out of season. They may be seen almost any month of the year on the covers of magazines, devoted to the moral and social uplift of young girls in general, and the American young girl in particular.

The February magazine peach crop is usually most abundant—All through the merry month of Saint Valentine they hang on the news-stands, singly or in clusters, and Peaches they are to be sure—Peaches in the stupidest, cheapest, slangiest nonsense of the word.

There they hang to quote the redundant Dr. Roget, F. R. S.—“simpering, smirking, sniggling, giggling, ogling, tittering, prinking, preening, flaunting, flirting, mincing, coquetting, frivoling, attitudinizing, self-conscious artificial, smug, namby-pamby, sentimental, unnatural, stagy, shallow, weak, wanting, soft, sappy, spoony, fatuous, idiotic, imbecile, driveling, blatant, babbling, vacant, foolish, silly, senseless, addle-pated, giddy, childish, chuckle-headed, puerile,” and, what is above all else inexcusable in a peach—mushy.

And these (in journals that set the fashions moral, mental, social and sartorial) for our young American sister at the most impressionable age of her life—the age when, whatever may be her dormant possibilities, she is by her nature irresistibly impelled to pattern herself after the favorite girl of her class in school, or the favorite actress on the stage—to copy her coiffure, her dress, her deportment, even the expression of her face.

And how, you ask, can a young girl be harmed by imitating what, however vacuous or silly, is after all only an expression?

The answer is, that just as a persistent bend of thought modifies and in time fixes the expression of the face, so a habitual expression (or lack of expression) of face influences the bend of thought and, in time, fixes the character.

If you don’t believe this, dear girl, stand before your looking-glass and smirk at yourself as hard as you can, until you look (as much as it is possible for a human girl to look) like a magazine-cover Peach. Then try to hold the “Peach” look while you recite:

You see it’s impossible! You can’t do it, any more than you can stroke your head up and down at the same time as you stroke your chest sideways. Your mouth has come out of curl—the foolish light has gone out of your eyes. Perhaps (if you really feel what you were reciting) you look just the least bit solemn. If so, try to hold the solemn look while you recite the following by a popular song writer:

By the time you have finished, your solemn reflection in the glass will have changed to something almost as idiotic as the “peach” on the magazine cover.

Without question, the vulgar standards of expression these simpering sirens are setting for the impressionable young girl of today will degrade her just as surely as the wholesome, high-bred type of womanhood evolved by Charles Dana Gibson improved and developed all that was best in her sister of twenty years ago.

The theory that nature imitates art is much older than Oscar Wilde, who (owing to the carelessness of Mr. Whistler) is supposed to have originated it.

It is so old that Mr. G. K. Chesterton any moment may rise to dispute it, and announce to an astonished London that it is Art that imitates Nature; nevertheless, Nature does imitate Art.

Is it possible that there is method in all this magazine madness? Is it possible that these magazines being devoted (among other devotions) to ladies’ attire, fear that too great an improvement in the female of our species would divert her thoughts from the imbecilities of dress to higher—and less profitable—things?

Allah forbid!