tony of farm life, the
stagnation of the rural community. The sameness, the humdrum tediousness
of the everyday life drives them to the city.

In the work of the farmstead, the Country Girl of this disheartened
group plainly sees that the subsidiary, detail work, which has no
intellectual and very little social stimulus will be assigned to her.
She knows that the monotony of this heterogeneous drudgery will daily
leave her too tired to go out, even if she has somewhere to go; and too
destitute of initiative to seize upon any form of pleasure unless she
has already a mind trained to find delight in books; and she sees no
prospect of being able to gain the training that will open fields of
intellectual enjoyment to her. She keenly feels the lack of recreation.
She comes to believe that if she were in the city she would not have
such late hours of labor. She does not see the twelve and fourteen hour
days of work in that rosy dream of good wages and leisured evenings in
town. On the farm it is from five in the morning till nine at night; the
work is not only too heavy for her, but it is closely confining. She has
not the strength for it; and the enforced toil exhausts her energy
prematurely. She now sees that the methods used in her household
workshop are laborious and out of date; her task is unnecessarily
difficult; and who can blame her if under such circumstances her
enthusiasm for her work fades away? There is resentment in the remark of
the young girl who said: "If we always have to work in an awkward
kitchen with rusty old pans, if we do not go anywhere and never have any
company, we do certainly want to leave the farm." When the blind gentian
speaks out like that the emphasis must be multiplied a hundred fold.

From the work of girls like these, incentive has been removed, or else
it was never there. This sort of Country Girl may not reason it out to
the point of clearness, but the lack of acknowledgment of her labor in
the farmstead as an industry, as an essential part of the business,
makes her toil seem hopeless; it renders her feeling toward whatever
charm the country may have for her permanently callous; and it takes all
the vibrancy out of her spirit. All this makes her alert to find
deep-seated defects in rural life in conditions that, but for her
disaffection would seem but difficulties easily overcome.

The look cityward is not always caused by the incitement of an uneasy, a
commercial, or an ignoble impu