WHY DO THEY?

Evening Post, Volume LXIV, Issue 83, 4 October 1902, Page 10 (Supplement)

WHY DO THEY?

A question which has come thundering down the corridors of time, bowling across buried cities and dead empires is this : Why do girls giggle? The giggling age begins at twelve and lasts till the girl is married. It generally stops then, and afterwards she does not always even smile so often'as her husband would like. But before marriage! If two or three girls are together, their heads will be in close proximity, and they are talking mysteriously and laughing "to kill." A maiiyhas just passed by, perhaps, and he is the subject of ttheir mirth. Or is it mirth? "Did you see him look at me?" says one. "Tee-bee !" "Looks like a jay, doesn't he? Teehee Il'I 1 ' says another. "See his* shoe-string, trailing behind hihi. Chee-chee, tee-bee !" remarks the third, if there are three of them. Now, there 1 is- nothing in the least amusing in the man or in any of these observations, j-et the girls, like those of their age and sex, are in convulsions of snicker. Why should they be? A young lady, being "interviewed on thi-s theme by an American paper, says that girls at their green age cannot make talk in company, so they giggle to fill in an awkward silence. She thinks sometimes, too, the older ones among them do it to show that women have a stm.se of humour, whereof an enemy has said their sex js destitute. But both these reasons together fail to account for the vast amount of tee-hee and hee-hpe that very young; persons of the feminine sex put out upon* thfe ambient atmosphere. They giggle when they are surprised and when they are- pleased, giggle when they are embarrassed and when they are amused, and for nothing at all. Why?