t leisure? If love, and love's climax, the
wedding march, follow soon upon a girl's leaving school, she is taken
out of the ranks of girlhood, and in accepting woman's highest vocation,
queenship in the kingdom of home, foregoes the ease of her girlish life
and its peril of _ennui_ and unhappiness together. This, however, is the
fate of the minority, and while young people continue, as thousands do,
to dread beginning home life upon small means, it must so remain.

Education is not a fetich, though some who ought to know better regard
it in that superstitious light. No amount of school training, dissevered
from religious culture and from that development of the heart and of the
conscience without which intellectual wealth is poverty, will lift
anybody, make anybody happier or better, or fit anybody for blithe
living in this shadowy world. I have no doubt that there are numbers of
girls whose education, having made them objects of deep respect to their
simple fathers and mothers, has also gone far to make the old home
intolerable, the home ways distasteful, and the old people, alas!
subjects of secret, deprecating scorn. A girl has, indeed, eaten of the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil when her eyes are opened in such
wise that she is ashamed of her plain, honorable, old-fashioned parents,
or, if not ashamed, is still willing to let them retire to the
background while she shines in the front.

I did not write this article for the purpose of saying what I hold to be
the bounden duty of every father and mother in the land; viz., to
educate the daughter as they educate the son, to some practical,
bread-winning pursuit. That should be the rule, and not the exception. A
girl should be trained so that with either head or hands, as artist or
artisan, in some way or other, she will be able to go into the world's
market with something for which the world, being shrewd and knowing what
it wants, will pay in cash. Rich or poor, the American father who fails
to give his daughter this special training is a short-sighted and cruel
man.

My thought was rather of the girls themselves. Some of them will read
this. So will some of their mothers-Mothers and daughters often, not
invariably, are so truly _en rapport_ that their mutual comprehension is
without a flaw. There are homes in which, with the profoundest regard
and the truest tenderness on both sides, they do not understand each
other. The mother either sees the daughter's d