The Girl and Her Religion | Page 7

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