The playground garden was surging with students, scattered through its broad grassy reaches like blossoms in motion, while the flowers sprung from the earth craned toward them in vain on outstretched necks, as though gazing enviously at the branches that leaned down tenderly till they touched the girls' hair and stirred long green frames about it.
I said to my companion: Here is the stage of girlhood. I cannot imagine children and girls anywhere but in a place rich in grass, abundant in shade and flowers. Set a girl in any garden or orchard and she becomes an inseparable part of it, as though she were a branch of that same stock, living by its life and growing by its growth. Shut her in a room that bars the ways of light and air from her and keeps her far from flower and tree, and she withers like an imprisoned flower. Gardens such as these were created for girls. Let us put each thing in the place that befits it.
He said: How hard you are on those with whom the hands of the years have toyed. Look at these girls. Do you not find among them some on whom the marks of age and the first signs of decline show, in spite of their youth?
I looked closely at the girls ringed around the trees, or arm in arm pacing the garden's length and breadth, or seated on the stones talking in voices that now rose and now fell. My glance had been a surface one; now it grew minute and searching. And my companion said: Look at this chestnut-haired girl, and watch her heavy gait and her strange figure. Her waist has thickened, her chest has narrowed, her shoulders have stooped: old age has begun in her, and she has not yet passed her sixteenth year.
I contemplated the girl, perplexed. Is it not a pity that she should grow in this abnormal way? And what is the cause? A weakness of heredity, or an unhealthy upbringing?... Perhaps this girl lived her childhood a prisoner, far from light and air; or grew up in an atmosphere of constraint and gloom, and is the product of that dismal atmosphere.
And my companion drew my attention to another girl whose body had gone flabby, so that she was slow of movement and heavy of step. Here is the result of an unathletic upbringing in childhood; small hope that exercise can mend it afterward.
And a flock of girls came into view, gathered near the water basin, enjoying their talk, contented of eye, with quiet smiles on their faces. And yet — I said to my companion — there is something in these
faces that I cannot accept, for all their freshness. Why these languid eyes, when I have always known girlhood by its sparkling eyes? Everything invites these girls to gaiety: their age, and the spring, and the flowers, and the water; yet in spite of all this I see in their bearing a shrinking and a listlessness. Is it the nightmare of past generations, still tightening its grip upon their throats?
And the little ones passed by, bare of arm and short of frock, skipping and twittering like birds of the field. What a difference between these and those! My companion cried: To what age, I wonder, will these keep their gaiety before the cloud of listlessness and boredom overtakes them? Does this not spring from the wearisome traditions they load upon a girl's shoulders as she approaches the age of maturity? Look at that dark girl with the lowered head. She is the eldest of four daughters, and it seems to me she carries in her face the traces of the care she glimpses in her parents.
But — I said, objecting — what do you make of the levity and the excessive gaiety of some of them? Those wild, nervous laughs, and that insistent craving for merriment and giddiness and abandon? He answered: They are, as you said, nervous states, produced by the pressure of environment on the one hand and the weakness of self-discipline on the other. They are brief snatched moments of gaiety, stolen by stealth and indulged to excess; but in the depths of their souls is an anxiety and a turmoil whose shadows are drawn upon their faces in times of quiet.
And here I recalled a remark of the headmistress of the school after her return from Europe. She said: "I showed pictures of the girls to schoolmates of theirs over there, and they all asked with one voice: Why do we see in their faces the marks of gravity and sternness, as if they were women in the middle of life?" And there came back to my memory a question an American lady once put to me: "Why are the eyes of Eastern women marked by melancholy and dreams?" I answered her then, without thinking: "Because we dream of the past."
But my interlocutor had stopped listening, for he was gazing with admiration at a girl of firm muscles, radiant face, head and shoulders held high, and a light, graceful step. And he said joyfully: Here is the future. When will the day come when all our girls are like this one?