lives,
and do the best work they can for the sake of it. Still, they may use
the home-making faculty in some measure in the humblest attic.

But there is a large and ever larger class of girls with other tastes
than domestic ones. Here, I think, the danger is greater than in case of
even the most unfortunate girls with domestic tastes; for tastes and
talents do not always agree. We have all known girls willing to practice
six hours a day who could never be musicians, and most girls think they
could write a book. Many people who are quite free to choose make too
ambitious a choice. It seems a part of the office of culture to correct
such ambitions. I have in mind a class of half-taught school-girls many
of whom fondly hoped to be poetesses; and I remember a class of highly
cultivated girls, who had had every advantage of education which money
could buy, who were full of anxiety on leaving school because they could
not see that they had capacity enough to do any work worth doing in the
world. The general verdict among them was that as they had money they
could give it to the poor, but that they had nothing in themselves. They
were as much too timid as the others were too confident.

A girl who has to earn her living has a safeguard, for which few are
very thankful. No one will pay her to indulge her tastes without
reference to her talents. She finds out gradually what _ought_ to be her
minor aim, for she discovers the special service she can render to the
world in return for what it offers to her. In most cases she wins a
reasonable measure of success and happiness.

But some of us are obstinate. We see one pathway we long to tread even
though it is beset with stones and briers. We are determined to take
that way, even if we never climb high enough to penetrate the low-lying
mists which darken it. We would rather pursue even a little way the
painful pathway which leads to the glorious mountain-top than to follow
an easier path to some lower summit. If we truly feel that, we do well
to take the path, for we have a right to forget ourselves for the sake
of our aim. But if we ask for success after all, it is mere blind vanity
which makes us so obstinate in our choice.

Let us remember that our direct usefulness in the world and most of our
conscious happiness will depend on our choosing and steadily pursuing as
our minor aim that for which our nature fits us, even if we wish our
nature had been different; while our utmost