our homes would lose much sunshine. Certainly no class in the
community is so constantly written about, talked at, and preached to as
our girls. And still there always seems to be room left for one word
more. I am persuaded that the leaven of discontent pervades girls of the
several social ranks, from the fair daughter of a cultured home to her
who has grown up in a crowded tenement, her highest ambition to dress
like the young ladies she sees on the fashionable avenue. City girls and
country girls alike know the meaning of this discontent, which sometimes
amounts to morbidness, and again only to nervous irritability.

I once knew and marveled at a young person who spent her languid
existence idly lounging in a rocking-chair, eating candy, and reading
novels, whilst her mother bustled about, provoking by her activity an
occasional remonstrance from her indolent daughter. "Do, ma, keep
still," she would say, with amiable wonder at ma's notable ways. This
incarnation of sweet selfishness was hateful in my eyes, and I have
often queried, in the twenty years which have passed since I saw her,
what sort of woman she made. As a girl she was vexatious, though no
ripple of annoyance crossed the white brow, no frown obscured it, and no
flurry of impatience ever tossed the yellow curls. She had no
aspirations which candy and a rocking-chair could not gratify. It is not
so with girls of a larger mind and greater vitality--the girls, for
instance, in our own neighborhood, whom we have known since they were
babies. Many of them feel very much dissatisfied with life, and do not
hesitate to say so; and, strangely enough, the accident of a collegiate
or common-school education makes little difference in their conclusions.

"To what end," says the former, "have I studied hard, and widened my
resources? I might have been a society girl, and had a good time, and
been married and settled sometime, without going just far enough to find
out what pleasure there is in study, and then stopping short."

I am quoting from what girls have said to me--girls who have been
graduated with distinction, and whose parents preferred that they should
neither teach, nor paint, nor enter upon a profession, nor engage in any
paid work. Polished after the similitude of a palace, what should the
daughters do except stay at home to cheer father and mother, play and
sing in the twilight, read, shop, sew, visit, receive their friends, and
be young women of elegan