The Privileged Girl : Part 1

The Girl and Her Religion
by Margaret Slattery

(Page 3 of 19)

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.

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.

Copyright, 1913 by Luther H. Cary
Fifth Printing, The Pilgrim Press
Boston