Chapter 8 THE GIRL WHO DRIFTS

More than two years have passed since I met one of the girls returning from a girls' conference where the depths of her nature, unstirred before had been touched and quickened into life. A passion to serve had been awakened in her and as she told me of her new visions and desires I confess that I feared for her. Here she was, the embodiment of all the charm and power of youth with a soul on fire to accomplish great things, and the temperament which does not accomplish great things.

When the train stopped she was met by her father, a keen, common sense, average business man who often expressed the wish that his daughter would "get busy and do something." She went home to a mother large hearted and self-sacrificing, proud of her attractive daughter and doing so much for her that little remained for her to do for herself. On Sunday she went to a formal, dignified, self-satisfied church; she attended a Sunday-school where the teacher made the lesson interesting without requiring much from the girls; she spent the afternoon with a book, the piano, and the relatives and friends who came to call. Church, home, friends, seemed content with her just as she was. She meant to do so much and to some of her friends she told with great enthusiasm her plans for future work. But the days passed as other days had passed. What became of her passion to serve, to share in the work of making life easier and happier? What became of the cry in her heart for something to do to express the new life which had fired her soul? They died. Slowly the fire was quenched by inaction, the embers grew cold, the longings were quieted, life went on as before-so easy it is to drift.

She has the sympathy of every one of us, the girl who "means to," for we also intend to do, and fail. Perhaps she learns from our vocabularies the words and phrases which so often appear in her own. "Tomorrow," she says, and "I am going to," "I intend" and "I mean some day to." She enjoys the present but all that she hopes to do she puts into the future. She does not realize at first that the future always has a day of reckoning and that suddenly when one least expects it, the future meets her in the present and says, "How about this and this and this which you were going to do? The time is past. What now?" Sometimes with bitter tears, often with deep regret, always in half guilty fashion the girl answers, "Well, I really meant to do it, only-"

If the drifting girl who "meant to" is to be strengthened in character she must be helped to substitute "I have done it" for "I really meant to do it."

The girl who continually "means to" and seldom "does," is usually emotional, responsive, lovable and irresponsible. I remember a most interesting teacher in the last year of the grammar school who had just such a girl in her room. The girl admired her teacher greatly, and whenever she expressed the desire to read a new book, to have the class see a fine picture, to use certain material for the lesson in drawing or painting, the girl promised that the book should be brought, the picture would gladly be loaned by her father, the poppies or tulips she would get from her garden. Almost never was the promise fulfilled, still she continued to promise. One afternoon her teacher talked with her after school and showed her a list of twenty-one things she had promised to do and had not done. "I know you do not mean to be untruthful, but you are," the teacher told her. "Whenever you promise now to do a thing, the other girls smile. You wanted to be chairman of the luncheon committee the other day and did not receive a single vote, not because the girls dislike you, but because they cannot depend upon you. You always intend to do things but they are not done. You-" The girl interrupted:

"Twenty-one promises to you, broken!" she exclaimed. "Twenty-one! I shall keep every one of them. Let me see them." Then she burst into tears and the old excuse fell almost unconsciously from her lips, "I meant to, I really meant to."

Sympathetically, but without being spared, the girl was shown that the promises could not be kept now; the time had passed and the things had been done by others. The inconvenience and unhappiness caused by many of these unkept promises were explained to her and the teacher asked that for one week she should make her no promises and that she should not volunteer to do anything for her.

"Oh, but I want to do things for you. I must!" she cried with all the passion of her emotional nature.

"What I want most," the teacher responded, "is that you do things, but say nothing."

The girl tried faithfully. Her love and admiration for the teacher furnished a strong motive, and the week showed a real gain. One day her mother called at the school. She said that her daughter had made a strange request of her. "She asked me," said the mother, "to compel her to do everything she promised to do, or said she was going to do and to punish her if she failed. I asked her to explain her strange request and learned of the struggle she has been making. It seems to me she is too young to assume responsibility to the extent of actually doing everything she just casually says she is willing to do or intends to do. We all fail to carry out our intentions."

The teacher helped that mother to see that a girl of fourteen is old enough to begin the struggle to establish the habit of doing what one means to do, and she realized her mistake. Together they decided to encourage the girl to refrain for the time being from making promises. Meanwhile they made requests for such services as seemed perfectly possible for her to render, being careful that but little time need elapse between the request and its required fulfilment, in order that action might follow rapidly the resolution to act. In the months that followed, the girl's effort to do what she said she would do, furnished many a scene of both tragedy and comedy, but slowly she gained and in two years the result was marvelous. A girl who because of her dependableness will be of great value in home, school and community is being made by the sane, wise sympathy of mother and teacher.

The girl who drifts because she "means to" and fails, is easy to love and easy to pardon for things left undone. But those interested in her welfare will spare neither time nor thought in the effort to help her gain the power to make connection between the intention to do and the actual doing.

When one observes carefully any large cosmopolitan group of young women, she sees some with hard faces, some marked by suffering, many marked by selfishness and fretfulness and many more showing dissatisfaction and unhappiness, and her mind goes back involuntarily to the fairy story with the mirror which showed "the girl you meant to be." The contrast between what many a girl meant to be and what she is, reveals a real tragedy.

Many a girl drifts through life always meaning to do-to be, yet missing the joy of accomplishment because she does not summon her will to her aid, and often because friends are too lenient and parents too thoughtless to make her see to what failure and unhappiness, meaning to do and never doing will invariably lead one. If a girl who some day "means to" should read this chapter let her seize at once the only life line which can ever save her. It is made up of three short words which are relentless, but if she obeys they will prove her salvation. Do it now, they read and for the girl who "intends to," there is no other way of escape.

There is another type of girl who drifts. She is explained by the phrase, "aimlessly drifting about." She is the girl who does not know where she is going. She has no objective. Often parents, teachers and friends have neglected to help her centralize her thought upon one thing which she desires to do and she has not seen for herself that while trying to do everything one accomplishes nothing. Many times she is a girl of varied talents and puts all her effort first upon this thing then upon that but never works long enough to complete anything or learn to do it well. In school she changes her courses just as often as it is permitted, in business she changes her position never remaining long enough in any one place to qualify for a better. If at home she drifts from settlement work to domestic science, from domestic science to a dancing club and the golf links. She gives herself to the current and the wind and drifts. She needs an anchor. She needs the strong will of another to steady her while she is developing her own. She needs a great ideal to guide her and hold her with the magnetic power of some North Star. She needs to have her ambition aroused and to be made to believe that she, as truly as any one in the world has a "call to serve." She needs to have great things expected and demanded of her.

The power which rescues the drifting girl is a power outside herself. It may be a call from the bank of the stream which causes her to pick up her oars and leave the current, at the call of danger, in answer to a cry for help; in times of sorrow and illness, many a drifting girl has come ashore and rendered noble service. Those who thought they knew her looked on with unconcealed surprise and said to one another, "I didn't think she had it in her." Yes, it was in her. There, undreamed of by those who saw her drifting. The drifting girl has within her all the possibilities. That is the pity of it. As she drifts she may lose oars, chart and compass and in the stress of the storm that is bound to come be carried out into the sea of darkness, or be wrecked upon the shoals or sandbars that line the stream of life.

A wise teacher, awakened parents, a good friend, a live church, a great book, these have the opportunity of pulling the girl out of the current, and steadying her until she fastens her life to the Ideal which can hold her.

I can see now the plain, dreamy face and great black eyes of the girl of whom parents and relatives said as they looked at her, "What will she ever amount to?" Their faces betrayed their own conviction that she would amount to nothing. She tried piano but concluded that the training necessary to make her a teacher would take too long and took up stenography. After a few weeks she decided that she was unfitted for the work and would rather be a nurse. Some weeks were spent at home just thinking about it, then she began her training. At the end of the period of probation she left-she knew she could never be a nurse. She spent the days reading, sewing a little, taking pictures in the woods and along the shore near her home and tinting them. She drifted through the months, through a year. One day she posed a group of children, watched her chance and caught them all unconscious and natural, interested in their pails and shovels and the tunnel she had helped to dig. The mothers of the children saw the picture. Beautifully tinted it seemed alive and they were enthusiastic. The next week she chanced to see a nine year old fishing with a child's faith. The perfect stillness of the usually active little body, the expectant look on the small face charmed her and in a moment, her camera had them. Every one who saw the picture exclaimed at its naturalness and life and a friend who believed she saw a future for the girl took it to the best photographer in the city. That night the photographer's call anchored the drifting girl. He made her feel that he had discovered an artist for which the city and many outside of it had been waiting. He fired her imagination and awakened her ambition. She felt that she had a real mission in reproducing all the sweet simplicity and naturalness of the child. She worked hard, the artistic temperament became trained and both fame and money came to the girl who would probably still have been drifting had not some one helped her find her work.

To criticize the drifting girl, even though she sorely tempts one to criticism of her, is not enough. To preach to her on the evil of drifting along without aim or purpose, just letting the days slip past, is not enough. The friends of the drifting girl must help her find her work and her mission and inspire her with the belief that she has both.

And there are the girls who drift because strong, capable, efficient mothers cannot conceive of them as anything but "little girls," cannot realize that they have grown up and continue to plan for them, to make all their decisions and choices as they did when their daughters, now twenty, were children of ten. This sort of girl needs sympathy and help, for in the years when her own powers should be developing they sleep. Her mother, though with the best motives and intentions in the world, is compelling her to drift through the years that should be filled with experience and effort and when the time comes that she must be left to herself and depend upon her own resources, her state is pitiful. The girl in the later teens and early twenties needs direction, advice and counsel but if she is to be saved from drifting she must learn to think for herself.

There is another girl who drifts, not aimlessly about, but downstream. She has lost her ideals. She has ignored the still small voice that tried to save her, until now it seldom speaks. One and another of her friends have been with her in the current but have left her and made their way to safety. Only those from whom at first she shrank are with her now. She has reached the place where the current is strong and rapid and escape is doubtful. Her mother still believes her good, her father still trusts her, but before long they will have to know. She began by saying not "I meant to," but "I didn't mean to, I didn't think it was wrong," not "I will do it tomorrow," but "I will never do it again." But she did it again and yet again. She let go of the help that the church offered and gave and went to the pleasure parks on Sunday. She let go of a good friend who held her to the truth, and made a companion of the girl who helped her invent the things she told her mother when she came home very late. She let go of the good books little by little and read the foolish stories that were exciting and absolutely impossible. She let go of the little courtesies and one by one of the laws that good society demands that its girls shall obey. She let go of modesty and in dress and speech allowed herself to drift into the current where it is swift and black.

If only parents had watched more closely, if girl friends had been stronger, and older friends wiser, it would have been so easy when the current just touched her and she was still near to all that is pure and good. But she is drifting-drifting more and more rapidly farther and farther downstream. Now and then she looks back, remembers all the ideals she once dreamed to reach and makes a feeble struggle to resist but the current bears her on. Only some mighty Power can save her.

To the girl who "means to," and "intends," to the girl who dreams and waits and dreams again, to the girl who has let go and is in the current this chapter throws out the challenge-Act now. You can! There is help. Take it.

* * *