On the face of it, the use of her farm as a summer annex to the working girls’ boarding-house in town was merely the whim of a kind-hearted old woman with her own peculiar notions of self-indulgence.  A cynical member of the summer colony remarked at the Casino that Mrs. Owen, with characteristic thrift, was inveigling shop-girls to her farm and then putting them to work in her kitchen.  Mrs. Owen’s real purpose was the study of the girls in Elizabeth House with a view to determining their needs and aptitude:  she was as interested in the woman of forty permanently planted behind a counter as in the gayest eighteen-year-old stenographer.  An expert had built for her that spring a model plant for poultry raising, an industry of which she confessed her own ignorance, and she found in her battery of incubators the greatest delight.

“When a woman has spent twenty years behind a counter, Sylvia, or working a typewriter, she hasn’t much ahead of her.  What’s the matter with ducks?”

They made prodigious calculations of all sorts that summer, and continued their study of catalogues.  Mrs. Owen expected to visit the best vocational schools in the country during the fall and winter.  The school could not be a large one, but it must be wisely planned.  Mrs. Owen had already summarized her ideas on a sheet of paper in the neat, Italian script which the daguerreotype ladies of our old seminaries alone preserve for us.  The students of the proposed school were to be girls between fifteen and eighteen, who were driven by necessity into shops, factories, and offices.  None should be excluded for lack of the knowledge presupposed in students ready for high school, and the general courses were to be made flexible so that those who entered deficient might be brought to a fixed standard.  The vocational branches were the most difficult, and at Sylvia’s suggestion several well-known authorities on technical education were called into conference.  One of these had visited Waupegan and expressed his enthusiastic approval of Mrs. Owen’s plans.  She was anxious to avoid paralleling any similar work, public or private.  What the city schools did in manual training was well enough, and she did not mean to compete with the state’s technical school, or with its reformatory school for erring girls.  The young girl about to take her place behind the ribbon counter, or at a sewing-machine in a garment factory, or as a badly equipped, ignorant, and hopeless stenographer, was the student for whom in due course the school should open its doors.  Where necessary, the parents of the students were to be paid the wages their daughters sacrificed in attending school during the two-year course proposed.  The students were to live in cottages and learn the domestic arts through their own housekeeping, the members of each household performing various duties in rotation.  The school was to continue in session the year round, so that flower—­and kitchen—­gardening might take rank with dressmaking, cooking, fruit culture, poultry raising, and other branches which Mrs. Owen proposed to have taught.