I have always been attracted to fresh, young faces. But then, who isn't likely to react to the appeal of youth? All the desirable features of attraction seem magnified in the young. Very young children appeal to the heartstrings of those in advanced years because of the vulnerability seen in those wide-open, curious eyes, wanting to know everything about existence in one wholesale gulp of exposure to anything new.

The eagerness to experience new circumstances, and the capacity of the young to embrace new knowledge has never failed to amaze me. I am always surprised at the sagacity of observation of young people, their casual expressions of truth and reality as it appears to them.

They seem to soak up knowledge at an astonishing rate, far surpassing what I dimly recall of my own experience so many years ago, it seems like ancient personal history. As though to prove that the human mind, when new and uncluttered is capable of absorbing minutiae of which earlier generations never had exposure to in an evolving technological, more pluralistic and population-crowded society.

Children reflect their inherent personalities at a very early stage in their development. Some indications of their character are available for observation from infancy on. Character traits for good or for ill. Traits that can become enhanced or alternately modified to make them less extreme in the final analysis to present the evolving mind which experience and observation has mellowed, or conversely solidified.

But when it comes to the aesthetics of confronting the reality of youth in its dewy bloom of relative innocence, nothing so much beckons forth from my inner consciousness of joy tinged with admiration as much as the vision of a young girl either on the cusp of her maturity, or one who has entered adulthood but retains that freshness and beauty bestowed on the young, the envy of the elderly of the human species.