The Girl and Her Religion | Page 7

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