remarked at the Casino that Mrs. Owen, with
characteristic thrift, was inveigling shop-girls to her farm and then
putting them to work in her kitchen. Mrs. Owen's real purpose was the
study of the girls in Elizabeth House with a view to determining their
needs and aptitude: she was as interested in the woman of forty
permanently planted behind a counter as in the gayest eighteen-year-old
stenographer. An expert had built for her that spring a model plant for
poultry raising, an industry of which she confessed her own ignorance,
and she found in her battery of incubators the greatest delight.

"When a woman has spent twenty years behind a counter, Sylvia, or
working a typewriter, she hasn't much ahead of her. What's the matter
with ducks?"

They made prodigious calculations of all sorts that summer, and
continued their study of catalogues. Mrs. Owen expected to visit the
best vocational schools in the country during the fall and winter. The
school could not be a large one, but it must be wisely planned. Mrs.
Owen had already summarized her ideas on a sheet of paper in the neat,
Italian script which the daguerreotype ladies of our old seminaries
alone preserve for us. The students of the proposed school were to be
girls between fifteen and eighteen, who were driven by necessity into
shops, factories, and offices. None should be excluded for lack of the
knowledge presupposed in students ready for high school, and the general
courses were to be made flexible so that those who entered deficient
might be brought to a fixed standard. The vocational branches were the
most difficult, and at Sylvia's suggestion several well-known
authorities on technical education were called into conference. One of
these had visited Waupegan and expressed his enthusiastic approval of
Mrs. Owen's plans. She was anxious to avoid paralleling any similar
work, public or private. What the city schools did in manual training
was well enough, and she did not mean to compete with the state's
technical school, or with its reformatory school for erring girls. The
young girl about to take her place behind the ribbon counter, or at a
sewing-machine in a garment factory, or as a badly equipped, ignorant,
and hopeless stenographer, was the student for whom in due course the
school should open its doors. Where necessary, the parents of the
students were to be paid the wages their daughters sacrificed in
attending school during the two-year course proposed. T