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 “composition” writers in reporting, their graduates would plant their weary feet far more readily than they do now when they come to a great city and beseech a busy editor to give them a chance.

Almost anything can be done with the plastic mind.  But not always.  It is the better part of wisdom for proud parents to discover just what their offspring’s facility amounts to before spending money on an art or a musical education, for instance.  I had a painful experience, and no doubt it has been duplicated a thousand times, for Europe before the war was full of girls (many living on next to nothing) who were studying “art” or “voice culture,” with neither the order of endowment nor the propelling brain-power to justify the sacrifice of their parents or the waste of their own time.

Some years ago, finding that a young relative, who was just finishing her school course, drew and painted in water colors with quite a notable facility, and the family for generations having manifested talents in one way or another, I decided to take her abroad and train her faculty that she might be spared the humiliation of dependence, nor feel a natural historic inclination to marry the first man who offered her an alternative dependence; and at the same time be enabled to support herself in a wholly congenial way.  I did not delude myself with the notion that she was a genius, but I thought it likely she would become apt in illustrating, and I knew that I could throw any amount of work in her way, or secure her a position in the art department of some magazine.

I took her to the European city where I was then living and put her in the best of its art schools.  To make a long story short, after I had expended some five thousand dollars on her, including traveling expenses and other incidentals, the net result was an elongated thumb.  I was forced to the conclusion that she had not an atom of real talent, merely the treacherous American facility.  Moreover, she lost all her interest in “art” when it meant hard work and persistent application.  I was wondering what on earth I was to do with her when she solved the problem herself.  She announced with unusual decision that she wanted to be a nurse, had always wanted to be a nurse (she had never mentioned the aspiration to me) and that nothing else interested her.  Her mother had been an invalid; one way or another she had seen a good deal of illness.