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 reproduce.  If they will not or cannot that is not her fault; she is always there with the urge.  Even when girls think they sell themselves for the adornments so dear to youth they are merely the victims of the race, driven toward the goal by devious ways.  Nature, of course, when she fashioned the world reckoned without science.  I sometimes suspect her of being of German origin, for so methodical and mechanical is her kultur that she will go on repeating “two and two make four” until the final cataclysm.