Boston offered none that
could help outside. Every one now smiles at the bad taste of
Queen Victoria and Louis Philippe -- the society of the forties
-- but the taste was only a reflection of the social slack-water
between a tide passed, and a tide to come. Boston belonged to
neither, and hardly even to America. Neither aristocratic nor
industrial nor social, Boston girls and boys were not nearly as
unformed as English boys and girls, but had less means of
acquiring form as they grew older. Women counted for little as
models. Every boy, from the age of seven, fell in love at
frequent intervals with some girl -- always more or less the same
little girl -- who had nothing to teach him, or he to teach her,
except rather familiar and provincial manners, until they married
and bore children to repeat the habit. The idea of attaching
one's self to a married woman, or of polishing one's manners to
suit the standards of women of thirty, could hardly have entered
the mind of a young Bostonian, and would have scandalized his
parents. From women the boy got the domestic virtues and nothing
else. He might not even catch the idea that women had more to
give. The garden of Eden was hardly more primitive.
To balance this virtue, the Puritan city had always hidden a
darker side. Blackguard Boston was only too educational, and to
most boys much the more interesting.
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