Chapter 3 THE PRIVILEGED GIRL

One finds her in all sorts of unexpected places. Last summer I saw her in a home of wealth and luxury. She was fifteen, the eldest of a family of four children. Behind her was a long line of ancestry of which anyone might rightfully be proud. Her face was pure and sweet and her eyes revealed the frankness and honest purpose of past generations. After breakfast she played for the hymns at prayers and in a clear, true, soprano led the singing. A twelve-year-old brother had selected the part of the Bible to be read and the eight-year-old sister had chosen the hymns.

The father's prayer was simple and sincere and some of its sentences were remembered for many a day. After prayers the girl attended to the flowers. This was her work for the summer. I saw her gather from their lovely garden dainty blossoms and sprays of green, making them with unusual skill into bouquets for the Flower Mission in the city. Then three small baskets were filled with pansies. These went to three old ladies in the factory section of the village. She told me they were "the sweetest old ladies" and "dear friends" of hers. She seemed to take real delight in making the baskets beautiful. I saw her later in the day galloping off through the woods on her horse, her face glowing with health and happiness. In the afternoon she spent an hour on German which she said was her "hopeless study," but I found her reading German folk lore with ease. She was familiar with the best things in literature, was intensely interested in art and revealed unusual knowledge without any evidence of precociousness. She was just a normal, healthy, natural girl, well-born, well-bred, a girl with every advantage. When I said good-night to her in her lovely room and thought of her protected, sheltered life, I wondered how she might be helped to know into what pleasant places her lot had fallen and how she might come to understand and do in later years her full duty toward the other fifteen-year-old girl who that day made paper boxes, feathers, flowers or shirtwaists, toiled in the laundries or the cotton factory, or walked with heavy heart from place to place searching for work. They are dependent upon one another, these two. They do not know it now, but if each is to be her best, they must know.

How to lead her daughter to value and help this other girl, that sweet mother told me as we talked in the library that night she felt was her great problem. "We women are responsible for so much," she said, "and our daughters will be responsible for still more. We must help them estimate things at their right value." With that thought and spirit in her mother's heart the girl I had watched all day with such pleasure seemed doubly privileged.

Last September I saw another privileged girl. She showed me her trunk packed for college. Every member of the family was interested in it, perhaps most of all her father who had put into the bank that first dollar on the day that she was born with the faith that what should be added to it might one day mean college. Behind her was a long line of honest ancestry, simple people who had worked hard and managed to "get along." She was the first on either side of the family to "go to college." No one in the family, even the most distant relative, failed to feel the importance of the event. "Tom's Dorothy goes to college this week-think of it," a great aunt, in a little unpainted, low-roofed farmhouse far away in the hills, told all her friends at church.

Great ambition, hopes and dreams were packed into that trunk and the day when she should graduate and come back to teach in the high school seemed near. Jack and Bessie and Newton were in her plans for using the money she should earn when those four short years were over.

SHE WAS FULL OF AMBITION AND WILLING TO WORK

Looking at her sweet, fresh face so full of happiness one knew her to be a privileged girl. All through high school she had had her purpose clear, her studies were a pleasure, her simple good times were enjoyed to the full and life, every moment of it, was worth the living. When I saw her lock the trunk and excitedly instruct the expressman as to just how it must be carried, I had a sudden vision of the thousands of girls, with happy faces filled with anticipation of all that is wrapped up in that one word, college. A great army of privileged girls, they are. One cannot help wishing that he might feel sure that when they leave those college halls it might be with a deep appreciation and real sympathetic understanding of the other girls who have turned their eyes with longing toward four years more of study and fun, but whose feet were obliged to walk in other pathways. They are so dependent upon one another, these girls who can go to college and the other girls who cannot go. They do not know it now but neither girl can ever come to her best until the privileged girl sees and understands.

One of the most interesting of the privileged girls I met one morning going to work. It was her third month in the office. "One of the finest in the city. There's a chance to work up, and me for the top," she told me, her face beaming. Her father had come across the sea from Sweden when a boy. Long generations of honest folk were behind him and he made good in the new land. He saved a good share of the wages he made in the bicycle shop, studied with a correspondence school and assumed more and more responsible positions with higher wages. At last he was able to build a house for his young family, at the end of the car line where the children had room to play and the cow and chickens kept the boys busy and taught them to work. Olga was the eldest and it was a proud night for the family when she graduated from grammar school. Going home on the trolley her father determined that she should have the desire of her heart and go for two years to business college. There was great rejoicing on the part of the family when he made his decision known and Olga hardly slept that night. When the two years were over the principal of the school had said such fine things of her work that Olga had blushed to hear them. More than that, he offered her the best position open to his students. He was a little astonished the next morning when Olga's father came down to ask in his careful English regarding the character of the men in the office where his daughter was to work. To Olga's great joy he was able to satisfy the father to whom the matter was of enough importance to make him put on his best clothes and take half a day off, in order to make sure that all was right.

It was a great day when Olga came home with her yellow envelope and laid the money on the table. Not a cent would her father take. "No, Olga," he said, "the money is yours. You shall keep the account of it and show it to your father. You shall buy the new bed for your room and the chairs. Your mother wants the house made pretty. Perhaps you will help. That will be very good. But the money is yours." No one seeing the girl's face as she related her father's words could doubt the appreciation in her heart. Her girl friends had "paid their board" and she had expected to do the same. That night she refurnished the house in her dreams and the memory of that dream room of her mother's, with paper on the wall and rugs on the floor, helped her save her money until the dream came true.

Olga is indeed a privileged girl. She has parents wise enough to have given her the best equipment possible for the work she wanted to do. She has her own money and may dress as well as any girl in the office. She has an object for saving what she can and knows the joy of helping to make home beautiful. The suburban church is the center of many of her pleasures, for it is alive and the young people in it know how to enjoy themselves. She is loved and sheltered in a real home. She can live a normal, useful, happy life with opportunity for promotion in her work and an object for her ambition. She has health, sane pleasures and good friends. Any such girl is indeed privileged.

When one sees her going happily to work he is forced to think of the other girl, her homeless boarding place, chance friends, pitiful economies and few pleasures; the girl who has forgotten what it means to be sheltered and protected, if she ever knew, to whom love is a myth or a dream.

Perhaps one of the happiest of the privileged girls was the one who took me to her room on a beautiful June day to show me her cedar chest, her gowns and the gifts already beginning to come. The day was near. The young man whom she was to marry was honest and fine, in business with his father and hoping to make the firm a greater success than ever, as the years should pass. The girl was just twenty-one. After high school, a mother who was not strong needed her help and she had made that home a center of enjoyment for three years. Surrounded by the loving appreciation of parents and brothers, her life was filled with happiness. Now in a few days she would go across the street to the house built for her and furnished simply and well, with the articles which he and she had chosen on the long shopping tours during the months past. She was in every sense a privileged girl.

The other girl saw her married. She was looking forward to her own wedding day but it seemed farther away than ever. She had no hope for a house built for her, but she knew where there was a flat for rental which she had mentally furnished many times that month. But they could not afford it. They had added and subtracted and gone over the figures again and again but it was of no use. He was manly and fine, he had hope and ambition, but the clerkship was only fifteen dollars a week and he had tried in vain for another position. Fifteen dollars a week would not do in their city. Butter, eggs, coal, ice, milk and meat stood in the way. So they were waiting and there were tears in her eyes at the wedding of the privileged girl.

That day was a hard one for another girl. She read of the wedding-the decorations, the gifts, the congratulations of friends-then putting down the paper forced back the tears and went out to finish the shirt waist she was making, for it must be ready to wear to the office in the morning. That evening he would come, she knew, to tell her again that it was not fair, that her family would get along some way and that he had been patient for a long time. She knew that he must continue to wait, for her mother was doing her utmost, Wilbur could earn only a little and the other two children were too young to leave school. It was three years since her father's death. The young man had said then that he could wait ten years. She had begged him to take his release but he refused. Of late he had been very insistent. She knew she must stand by her mother and help her through. If he could not see it that way there was but one thing to do. She found it hard even to think the words that she must say and she thought of the privileged girl with longing in her soul. But the privileged girl did not know. If she had, her sympathy and understanding would have helped.

One rejoices as he remembers the thousands of pure, sweet, wholesome girls who have been privileged to enjoy the results of a long ancestry unstained by weakness and sin, the results of training, guidance and protection, the opportunity for healthful, normal living, for pleasures and the satisfaction of human friendship and love. Our country looks today with increasing hopefulness to these privileged girls for the solution of many of the problems of the other girl. Our country looks to them for another generation of privileged girls even stronger and wiser than they.

One of the greatest of the problems with which our country is concerned today, the solution of which involves every phase of social, religious and economic life, is the providing of ways and means by which the unprivileged girl may, in large numbers, be promoted into the privileged class.

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