More than that the girl who is termed wooden can learn to express herself in words.  She may never become a great talker but she need not regret that.  She can take part in conversation and can make it easy for people to talk with her.  I know a girl who plans before spending a social evening with friends what she will talk about.  Following the advice of her mother who has suffered much through inability to talk, she holds imaginary conversations which often become real when she meets people later.  She makes a special effort to remember the names of those whom she meets and some of the things in which they are especially interested.  She is learning to remember the names of books and their authors and publishers, she takes special pains to remember worth while magazine articles and last spring people appealed to her again and again for information regarding the Balkan situation.  She is making herself an interesting companion and in a few years I believe all traces of the awkward wooden silence will disappear.

In the long line of misunderstood girls, are many whose interests and enthusiasms are altogether outside their immediate environment.  There are girls at college and sometimes at boarding-school who have seen a larger world and have come to love the real things of life.  They find it very hard to waste the days in superficialities.  They long to have life mean more than a round of social events, and the family and friends misunderstand.  Some girls of this sort have solved the problem by gaining consent to plan their own days.  Some have never been able to gain that consent and have gone on for years in unhappiness.  Others have learned to inject into the seemingly superficial some real things and have found an outlet for the best that is in them through work for those in need.  One must feel real sympathy for the girl who, striving to be her best, to live above the round of pettiness and selfish pleasure, is met with disapproval and misunderstanding.

Many a girl is misunderstood by the one person in the world who ought to understand her best—­her mother.  Perhaps more bitter tears are shed by girls because their mothers do not understand than for any other reason.  The misunderstanding oftentimes is the result of temperament.  It is exceedingly hard for two people of diametrically opposite temperaments to live in close association without clashes.  One of the most pitiful things in home life today is seen where mother and daughter have opposite interests and sympathies and lack self-control.  The constant criticism and judging of one another, the quick-tempered commands and demands on the part of one and the sullen yielding on the part of the other make one heart-sick.