text:  And when I was told insultingly to cease "my girlish tears" that word "_girlish_" had no sting for me except as a verbal echo to the one eternal thought of my heart--that a girl was the sweetest thing I in my short life had known--that a girl it was who had crowned the earth with beauty and had opened to my thirst fountains of pure celestial love from which in this world I was to drink no more