When one observes carefully any large cosmopolitan group of young women, she sees some with hard faces, some marked by suffering, many marked by selfishness and fretfulness and many more showing dissatisfaction and unhappiness, and her mind goes back involuntarily to the fairy story with the mirror which showed “the girl you meant to be.”  The contrast between what many a girl meant to be and what she is, reveals a real tragedy.

Many a girl drifts through life always meaning to do—­to be, yet missing the joy of accomplishment because she does not summon her will to her aid, and often because friends are too lenient and parents too thoughtless to make her see to what failure and unhappiness, meaning to do and never doing will invariably lead one.  If a girl who some day “means to” should read this chapter let her seize at once the only life line which can ever save her.  It is made up of three short words which are relentless, but if she obeys they will prove her salvation. Do it now, they read and for the girl who “intends to,” there is no other way of escape.

There is another type of girl who drifts.  She is explained by the phrase, “aimlessly drifting about.”  She is the girl who does not know where she is going.  She has no objective.  Often parents, teachers and friends have neglected to help her centralize her thought upon one thing which she desires to do and she has not seen for herself that while trying to do everything one accomplishes nothing.  Many times she is a girl of varied talents and puts all her effort first upon this thing then upon that but never works long enough to complete anything or learn to do it well.  In school she changes her courses just as often as it is permitted, in business she changes her position never remaining long enough in any one place to qualify for a better.  If at home she drifts from settlement work to domestic science, from domestic science to a dancing club and the golf links.  She gives herself to the current and the wind and drifts.  She needs an anchor.  She needs the strong will of another to steady her while she is developing her own.  She needs a great ideal to guide her and hold her with the magnetic power of some North Star.  She needs to have her ambition aroused and to be made to believe that she, as truly as any one in the world has a “call to serve.”  She needs to have great things expected and demanded of her.

The power which rescues the drifting girl is a power outside herself.  It may be a call from the bank of the stream which causes her to pick up her oars and leave the current, at the call of danger, in answer to a cry for help; in times of sorrow and illness, many a drifting girl has come ashore and rendered noble service.  Those who thought they knew her looked on with unconcealed surprise and said to one another, “I didn’t think she had it in her.”  Yes, it was in her.  There, undreamed of by those who saw her drifting.  The drifting girl has within her all the possibilities.  That is the pity of it.  As she drifts she may lose oars, chart and compass and in the stress of the storm that is bound to come be carried out into the sea of darkness, or be wrecked upon the shoals or sandbars that line the stream of life.