be developing they sleep.  Her mother, though with the best motives and intentions in the world, is compelling her to drift through the years that should be filled with experience and effort and when the time comes that she must be left to herself and depend upon her own resources, her state is pitiful.  The girl in the later teens and early twenties needs direction, advice and counsel but if she is to be saved from drifting she must learn to think for herself.

There is another girl who drifts, not aimlessly about, but downstream.  She has lost her ideals.  She has ignored the still small voice that tried to save her, until now it seldom speaks.  One and another of her friends have been with her in the current but have left her and made their way to safety.  Only those from whom at first she shrank are with her now.  She has reached the place where the current is strong and rapid and escape is doubtful.  Her mother still believes her good, her father still trusts her, but before long they will have to know.  She began by saying not “I meant to,” but “I didn’t mean to, I didn’t think it was wrong,” not “I will do it tomorrow,” but “I will never do it again.”  But she did it again and yet again.  She let go of the help that the church offered and gave and went to the pleasure parks on Sunday.  She let go of a good friend who held her to the truth, and made a companion of the girl who helped her invent the things she told her mother when she came home very late.  She let go of the good books little by little and read the foolish stories that were exciting and absolutely impossible.  She let go of the little courtesies and one by one of the laws that good society demands that its girls shall obey.  She let go of modesty and in dress and speech allowed herself to drift into the current where it is swift and black.

If only parents had watched more closely, if girl friends had been stronger, and older friends wiser, it would have been so easy when the current just touched her and she was still near to all that is pure and good.  But she is drifting—­drifting more and more rapidly farther and farther downstream.  Now and then she looks back, remembers all the ideals she once dreamed to reach and makes a feeble struggle to resist but the current bears her on.  Only some mighty Power can save her.

To the girl who “means to,” and “intends,” to the girl who dreams and waits and dreams again, to the girl who has let go and is in the current this chapter throws out the challenge—­Act now. You can!  There is help.  Take it.

IX

THE GIRL WITH HIGH IDEALS

Ideals make men and women and the process of ideal making begins in childhood.  A great deal has been written and said about the value of the early ideals born in the home, but too much cannot be said, and the value of the influence of good homes and parents whose ideals are high cannot be overestimated.  The girl whose home life during the first seven years has not brought to her the high ideal must struggle all her later life to build up and intrench in her mind what might have been hers without conscious effort.  Very early in her life the little girl reveals in her play, in her conversation, in her countless imitative acts, the ideals which are being formed.