up a ladder, to
professorship and good salary, from which they swing off into law,
physics, or perhaps the legislative firmament, leaving difficulties and
obstacles like nebulae in their wake.--You girls, satisfied with
mediocrity, have an eye mainly for the 'main chance'--marriage. If you
marry wealthy,--which is marrying well according to the modern popular
idea,--you dress more elegantly, cultivate more fashionable society,
leave your thinking for your husband and your minister to do for you,
and become in the economy of life but a sentient nonentity. If you are
true to the grand passion, and accept with it poverty, you bake, brew,
scrub, spank the children, and talk with your neighbor over the back
fence for recreation, spending the years literally like the horse in a
treadmill, all for the lack of a purpose,--a purpose sufficiently potent
to convert the latent talent into a gem of living beauty, a creative
force which makes all adjuncts secondary, like planets to their central
sun. Choose some one course or calling, and master it in all its
details, sleep by it, swear by it, work for it, and, if marriage crowns
you, it can but add new glory to your labor."

Dr. Hall says that the world has urgent need of "girls who are mother's
right hand; girls who can cuddle the little ones next best to mamma, and
smooth out the tangles in the domestic skein when things get twisted;
girls whom father takes comfort in for something better than beauty, and
the big brothers are proud of for something that outranks the ability to
dance or shine in society. Next, we want girls of sense,--girls who have
a standard of their own regardless of conventionalities, and are
independent enough to live up to it; girls who simply won't wear a
trailing dress on the street to gather up microbes and all sorts of
defilement; girls who don't wear a high hat to the theatre, or lacerate
their feet with high heels and endanger their health with corsets;
girls who will wear what is pretty and becoming and snap their fingers
at the dictates of fashion when fashion is horrid and silly. And we want
good girls,--girls who are sweet, right straight out from the heart to
the lips; innocent and pure and simple girls, with less knowledge of sin
and duplicity and evil-doing at twenty than the pert little schoolgirl
of ten has all too often. And we want careful girls and prudent girls,
who think enough of the generous father who toils to maintain them in
comfort,