e my husband and the little girl when I was
still young. They think I'm hard--yes, a good many people do--because
I've been making money. But I had to do something; I couldn't sit with
my hands folded; and what I've done I've tried to do right. I hope you
won't leave love and marriage out of your life, Sylvia. In this new
condition of things that we've talked about there's no reason why a
woman shouldn't work--do things, climb up high, and be a woman, too.
He'll be a lucky man who gets you to stand by him and work for him and
with him."

"Oh," sighed Sylvia, "there are so many things to do! I want to know so
much and do so much!"

"You'll know them and do them; but I don't want you to have a one-sided
life. Dear Sylvia," and Mrs. Owen bent toward the girl and touched her
hand gently, "I don't want you to leave love out of your life."

There was an interval of silence and then Mrs. Owen opened a drawer and
drew out a faded morocco case. "Here's a daguerreotype of my mother and
me, when I was about four years old. Notice how cute I look in those
pantalets--ever see those things before? Well, I've been thinking that
I'm a kind of left-over from daguerreotype times, and you belong to the
day of the kodak. I'm a dingy old shadow in a daguerreotype picture, in
pantalets, cuddled up against my mother's hoopskirt. You, Sylvia, can
take a suit-case and a kodak and travel alone to Siam; and you can teach
in a college alongside of men and do any number of things my mother
would have dropped dead to think about. And," she added quizzically, "it
gives me heart failure myself sometimes, just thinking about it all. I
can't make you throw your kodak away, and I wouldn't if I could, any
more than I'd want you to sit up all night sewing clothes to wear to
your school-teaching when you can buy better ones already made that have
real style. It tickles me that some women have learned that it's
weak-minded to massage and paraffine their wrinkles out--those things,
Sylvia, strike me as downright immoral. What I've been wondering is
whether I can do anything for the kind of girls we have at Elizabeth
House beyond giving them a place to sleep, and I guess you've struck the
idea with that word efficiency. No girl born to-day, particularly in a
town like this, is going back to make her own soap out of grease and lye
in her back yard. But she's got to learn to do something well or she'll
starve or go to the bad; or if she doesn't have to work sh