A wise teacher, awakened parents, a good friend, a live church, a great book, these have the opportunity of pulling the girl out of the current, and steadying her until she fastens her life to the Ideal which can hold her.

I can see now the plain, dreamy face and great black eyes of the girl of whom parents and relatives said as they looked at her, “What will she ever amount to?” Their faces betrayed their own conviction that she would amount to nothing.  She tried piano but concluded that the training necessary to make her a teacher would take too long and took up stenography.  After a few weeks she decided that she was unfitted for the work and would rather be a nurse.  Some weeks were spent at home just thinking about it, then she began her training.  At the end of the period of probation she left—­she knew she could never be a nurse.  She spent the days reading, sewing a little, taking pictures in the woods and along the shore near her home and tinting them.  She drifted through the months, through a year.  One day she posed a group of children, watched her chance and caught them all unconscious and natural, interested in their pails and shovels and the tunnel she had helped to dig.  The mothers of the children saw the picture.  Beautifully tinted it seemed alive and they were enthusiastic.  The next week she chanced to see a nine year old fishing with a child’s faith.  The perfect stillness of the usually active little body, the expectant look on the small face charmed her and in a moment, her camera had them.  Every one who saw the picture exclaimed at its naturalness and life and a friend who believed she saw a future for the girl took it to the best photographer in the city.  That night the photographer’s call anchored the drifting girl.  He made her feel that he had discovered an artist for which the city and many outside of it had been waiting.  He fired her imagination and awakened her ambition.  She felt that she had a real mission in reproducing all the sweet simplicity and naturalness of the child.  She worked hard, the artistic temperament became trained and both fame and money came to the girl who would probably still have been drifting had not some one helped her find her work.

To criticize the drifting girl, even though she sorely tempts one to criticism of her, is not enough.  To preach to her on the evil of drifting along without aim or purpose, just letting the days slip past, is not enough.  The friends of the drifting girl must help her find her work and her mission and inspire her with the belief that she has both.

And there are the girls who drift because strong, capable, efficient mothers cannot conceive of them as anything but “little girls,” cannot realize that they have grown up and continue to plan for them, to make all their decisions and choices as they did when their daughters, now twenty, were children of ten.  This sort of girl needs sympathy and help, for in the years when her own powers should