e disturbing memory of unkind,
coarse, or foolish words.

Yet school should be the last place in which to indulge in idle talk.
Such indulgence is against all the idealism of student life. Idle or
meddlesome talk never helps any one, either the one who talks or the one
who is discussed. If you have anything to say about other people, and if
going to them will help you, the only friendly thing to do--it is not an
easy thing--is to speak to the people concerned. If we really knew how
to put ourselves in other people's places, no unkind, unfriendly words
would ever be spoken again. There would be things hard to bear
said--rebuke or reproof are never easy to receive--but nothing
unfriendly. Think how idle, ill-natured talk flows around the world, and
then think what a different world it would be if there were none of it!
It is to human life what the blights, the scales, the insect pests are
to tree and flower. Fortunately, as people grow older they come to think
themselves less infallible, and as they grow wiser they become more
tender and more lenient in their judgments.

In companionship whose leisure interests are good there is a sense of
freedom filled full and running over, of minds and hearts doubly rich,
of good times doubly jolly. But on the whole, girls have too little
absolute solitude; there is scarcely a girl in twenty, except the "dig,"
who is alone at all. One trouble with dormitory school life is that it
fosters leisure-wasting and time-wasting "gang" habits. A girl so
surrounded never wants to be alone a moment, either indoors or out. With
such, the blessing and blessedness of solitude should be learned, for
solitude rightly used makes strong men and women.

The woman who has leisure has a grasp upon time, is master of it instead
of being mastered by it. It is the girl whirled around in a squirrel
cage of pointless weekly and Sunday engagements who is oppressed and
mastered by her lack of freedom. And then there is the hard-pressed
future; we must lay up some leisure for that. The time when one is most
hurried is the time when one most needs the sense of freedom. The story
of the old Quaker lady who had so much to do she didn't know where to
begin, and so took a nap, is profoundly full of wisdom. When the old
lady woke up she found she had plenty of time after all, not because she
had done anything but because she had come again into a leisurely frame
of mind.

Leisure means neither a blank mind nor an e