“Now, you see why I chose the street to make a living,” she said.  “We used father’s life insurance and mother had to have things.  She will not live a month now, the doctor says.  My sister can soon earn her own living and I can help Fred until he is old enough to help himself, by working in my old position.  But for a while I must have money!  I hate myself, you understand, but I had to have the money.  Oh, mother, mother, it is the last thing you would have me do, but I did it for you and the children,” she sobbed.  This was the hard, indifferent girl who didn’t care for anything.  The matron and officer looking at the sobbing girl recorded one more tragedy upon the annals of their experience and set about helping one more girl back into the straight way.

In how many types we find her, the indifferent girl and the girl who does not care, and for what varied reasons indifference and the don’t care spirit have fallen upon her.  Whatever the cause of her indifference she is a problem.  One of the High School girls in a group discussing another girl put it quite forcefully when she said, “Yes, I’d like to help Alice, but she doesn’t want to be helped.  She just doesn’t care about anything.  If you don’t invite her she doesn’t seem to mind, if you do she doesn’t care whether she goes or not.  I’d rather die than not care about anything.”  “Such people are so uncomfortable to have around, I’d rather have a girl who gets mad,” was the opinion of another in the group.  Young people feel naturally that there is something vitally wrong about the girl who has no enthusiasm, whom all the interesting life of every day fails to arouse.  And there is something wrong.  The problem facing those who have to do with the indifferent, don’t care girl is to find what is wrong.  Indifference is merely a symptom—­there is always a cause.  One may discover if he will the things to which the girl is not indifferent, her real interests.  Knowing these, he sees the door through which he must go to awaken other interests.  Sympathy and friendship are the foes of indifference.  If one “feels with” the girl who does not care, he may help to awaken her interests.  Friendship can discover causes which nothing else can find.

But there is one word which must be stricken from the vocabulary of parents, teachers and friends, who hope to awaken the indifferent girl.  It is the word hopelessly.  Hopelessly dull, hopelessly bad, hopelessly indifferent!  Experience teaches that these must go.  No teacher has a hopeless pupil, no mother has a hopeless daughter.  One may regard the indifferent girl as a difficult problem but never a hopeless one.  Behind the indifference and the don’t-care is the real girl and one must with patience and sympathy find her.

VII

THE GIRL WHO WORSHIPS THE TWIN IDOLS