chance and caught them all unconscious and natural, interested in
their pails and shovels and the tunnel she had helped to dig. The
mothers of the children saw the picture. Beautifully tinted it seemed
alive and they were enthusiastic. The next week she chanced to see a
nine year old fishing with a child's faith. The perfect stillness of
the usually active little body, the expectant look on the small face
charmed her and in a moment, her camera had them. Every one who saw the
picture exclaimed at its naturalness and life and a friend who believed
she saw a future for the girl took it to the best photographer in the
city. That night the photographer's call anchored the drifting girl. He
made her feel that he had discovered an artist for which the city and
many outside of it had been waiting. He fired her imagination and
awakened her ambition. She felt that she had a real mission in
reproducing all the sweet simplicity and naturalness of the child. She
worked hard, the artistic temperament became trained and both fame and
money came to the girl who would probably still have been drifting had
not some one helped her find her work.

To criticize the drifting girl, even though she sorely tempts one to
criticism of her, is not enough. To preach to her on the evil of
drifting along without aim or purpose, just letting the days slip past,
is not enough. The friends of the drifting girl must help her find her
work and her mission and inspire her with the belief that she has both.

And there are the girls who drift because strong, capable, efficient
mothers cannot conceive of them as anything but "little girls," cannot
realize that they have grown up and continue to plan for them, to make
all their decisions and choices as they did when their daughters, now
twenty, were children of ten. This sort of girl needs sympathy and help,
for in the years when her own powers should be developing they sleep.
Her mother, though with the best motives and intentions in the world, is
compelling her to drift through the years that should be filled with
experience and effort and when the time comes that she must be left to
herself and depend upon her own resources, her state is pitiful. The
girl in the later teens and early twenties needs direction, advice and
counsel but if she is to be saved from drifting she must learn to think
for herself.

There is another girl who drifts, not aimlessly about, but downstream.
She has lost her ideals. She