ess problem of the lady suddenly thrown upon her own resources.

No doubt this problem will have ceased to exist twenty years hence.
Every girl, rich or poor, and all grades between, will have
specialized during her plastic years on something to be used as a
resource; but at present there are thousands of young women who find
the man they married in ignorance an impossible person to live with
and yet linger on in wretched bondage because what little they know of
social conditions terrifies them. If they are pretty they fear other
men as much as they fear their own husbands, and for all the "jobs"
open to unspecialized women, they seem to be preeminently unfitted. If
the rich women of every large city would build a great college in
which every sort of trade and profession could be taught, from nursing
to stenography, from retouching photographs to the study of law,
while the applicant, after her sincerity had been established, was
kept in comfort and ease of mind, with the understanding that she
should repay her indebtedness in weekly installments after the college
had launched her into the world, we should have no more such ghastly
plays as _The Fugitive_ or hideous sociological tracts as _A Bed of
Roses_.

IV

ONE SOLUTION OF A GREAT PROBLEM

I

The world is willing and eager to buy what it wants. If you have goods
to sell you soon find your place at the counter, unless owing to some
fault of character your fellow barterers and their patrons will have
none of you. Of course there is always the meanest of all passions,
jealousy, waiting to thwart you at every turn, but no woman with a
modicum of any one of those wares the world wants and must have need
fear any enemy but her own loss of courage.

The pity is that so many women with no particular gift and only minor
energies are thrust into the economic world without either natural or
deliberate equipment. All that saves them in nine cases out of ten is
conserved energies, and if they are thrust out too young they are
doubly at a disadvantage.

A good deal has been written about the fresh enthusiasm of the young
worker, as contrasted with the slackened energies and disillusioned
viewpoint of middle life. But I think most honest employers will
testify that a young girl worker's enthusiasm is for closing time, and
her dreams are not so much of the higher skilfulness as of the
inevitable man. Nature is inexorable. She means that the young things
shall repr