The Girl and Her Religion | Page 8

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IV
THE GIRL WHO IS EASILY LED
She is a chameleon sort of girl but she is not rare. So often she is sweet and lovable. Almost without exception she is obliging, a jolly companion, fearless and frank. One often finds her a girl of talent and natural ability. She is the very opposite of the indifferent girl for she responds to everything. The girl she will finally become depends upon the companions whose lead she follows. Her safety lies in the establishment of the habit of going in the right way. She is the girl who most needs care and guardianship. So much depends upon her choice of friends that parents and teachers must be wise for her.
A little ten-year-old, in whom all her teachers were interested because of her versatility and quick response to every interest, moved into a new neighborhood. Some weeks later because of her ability to learn rapidly she was put into a higher grade. Her new home and new classmates in a short time entirely changed the character of her environment. Before long the girl herself began to show the result of the change. She had always been too much interested in her studies to waste time or disobey the school rules. Following the leadership of some of the newly made friends she entered into all the little conspiracies of a group of girls and boys who made things hard for the teacher, a rather weak disciplinarian. One day, the girl hitherto perfectly honest, told a lie to get out of the trouble into which the following of the new leaders had brought her. It troubled her conscience and she cried on the way home from school, but her companions laughed at her, told her she was "all right," and had stood by them splendidly. They made her feel heroic and she dried her eyes and stifled her desire to tell her mother. Before the year was over the child had entirely changed. Her studies suffered, she seemed to lose her ambition, her naturalness and spontaneity vanished. Her mother began to discover increasing untruthfulness. One day, toward the close of the school year, the child asked to wear her best dress to school, saying there was to be an entertainment. There was no entertainment. Instead there was a party at the home of one of the girls of whom her mother disapproved. The party began later than they had planned and it was nearly six before the child reached home. She found her mother greatly troubled and said quite glibly that she had stayed after school to help the teacher. Next day the mother called at the school to remonstrate with the teacher for keeping the child so often and so late to "help" her. Then the whole truth came out and the mother was dismayed. She felt that the matter was so serious that she must remove her daughter at once from her companions and before school opened in the fall the family had moved back to their former neighborhood and the parents were permitted to send the little girl to another school where new associates were carefully chosen. Before she left that grammar school she had recovered her frank, sweet spirit, her interest in her studies returned, and surrounded by a group of fine boys and girls she went through the high school with the love and respect of teachers and companions.
This child is the type of many, who as early as ten years and younger, are so easily led that their natural tendencies toward good are wholly transformed by association with evil companions whose strong personality and power of leadership can so easily turn the weak wills into the wrong pathway.
Parents and teachers cannot be too careful of the companions of a girl of vacillating, easy-going, versatile temperament, for they may ruin or make her.
When Leonora moved from the great manufacturing city, which had been her home for fourteen years, to the home of her aunt, in a quiet suburb, where the children attending the high school were from homes of real culture and refinement, she was disconsolate. Voices, language, games, manner of recitation, behavior on the school grounds and street, perplexed her. She seemed lost in her new environment. She had never been a leader but had followed with all her heart. Her playground had been the street. She had enjoyed boisterous good times, had patronized moving pictures of every sort, had entered into the mischief of "the crowd" always close to the leader. In a pathetic letter to one of her chums she said that at the very first opportunity she should run away and be with them all again. She characterized the beautiful suburb with its neatly kept lawns and pretty homes as "a dead old hole" from which she