ered with the aid of borrowed capital.

A large number of girls, who, without being rich, had led the
sheltered life before the fire, were obliged to go to work at once.
Some were clever enough to know what they could do and did it without
loss of time, some were assisted, others blundered along and nearly
starved.

Often men who have done well and even brilliantly up to middle life,
are not equal to the tremendous demand upon the vital energies of
beginning life over again after some disastrous visitation of Nature,
or a panic, or an ill-advised personal venture has wrecked their own
business or that of the concern in which they were a highly paid cog.
In the mining States men are dependent upon the world's demand for
their principal product. Farmers and stock-raisers are often cruelly
visited, strikes or hard times paralyze mills and factories; and in
times of panic and dry-rot the dealers in luxuries, including
booksellers--to say nothing of the writers of books as well as the
devotees of all the arts--are the first to suffer. And it is their
women that suffer acutely, because although many of these men may hang
on and recover, many more do not. They have used up their vital
forces. It is not so much a matter of will as of physics. A woman in
the same conditions who had been obliged to tax her vital organs for
an equal number of years would no doubt have lasted as long.

Unless defective, there is not a girl alive, certainly not an
American girl, who is wholly lacking in some sort of ability. The
parasite type (who is growing rare in these days, by the way, for it
is now the fashion to "do things") either fastens herself upon
complacent relatives or friends when deserted by fortune, or drifts
naturally into the half-world, always abundantly recruited from such
as she.

Many girls have a certain facility in the arts and crafts, which, with
severe training, might fit them for a second place in the class which
owes its origin to Heaven-born gifts. If their facility manifests
itself in writing they could be trained at college, or even on the
small local newspaper to write a good mechanical story, constructed
out of popular elements and eminently suited to the popular magazine.
Or they may fit themselves for dramatic or musical criticism, or
advertisement writing, which pays enormously but is not as easy as it
sounds. Or if every school (I am saying nothing about girls' colleges)
would train their promising "composit