alone in trains and trolleys nor learned to jostle and push through crowds.  She was not compelled to return home late at night without proper escort as countless girls are today.  She never spent the evening on the streets, nor was she obliged to join the great army of girls who today live alone in boarding houses in great cities, suffering from discomforts and desperate loneliness.  Her parents were more careful than the majority of parents today and she knew what protection meant.

It is because these things are so that one feels like giving added praise to the girls who today are girls of high ideals, who refuse to let the carelessness of the times in which they live gain entrance to their hearts to tarnish those ideals.

A short distance up the shore as I write I can hear the roar of the tide as it rushes into the very center of a great rock of granite.  The geologist can find in that mass of rock the tiny crevice where the water first gained entrance.  It has split it asunder because it was able to gain entrance through a little crack and each day sent in its drops of water where now with that roar rushes the tide.  Farther along the shore is a solid block of granite.  Its face is polished smooth by the dashing waves.  There is not a crack in it, not a tiny crevice.  It presents its splendid, shining surface to the great sea but offers it no opportunity for entrance.

One cannot help wishing with all his soul that we may have more and more girls who are like that bit of solid granite, strongly resisting those things that seek a tiny crevice by which to enter.  For we have so many who through some weak spot have let the tide of evil in and slowly it has done its work until now the once strong and fine ideals lie broken and beaten by the waves.

The strong girls of high ideals are with us and it is a comfort and a joy to look into their young faces so full of promise and of courage.  We find them among the very rich and among the very poor as well as among the girls who live in comfort with neither riches nor poverty to make things exceedingly hard.

Irene is one of the girls who amidst poverty and sin has been able to keep her ideals high.  Her home is poor because her father, a mechanic, who can earn good wages is a hard drinker.  Her mother, an honest, clean, hard working woman, is nervous and fretful, worn out by the hard things she has had to meet.  It is a quarrelsome household and when the father comes home intoxicated the law is obliged often to interfere.  One of the boys was expelled from school because his language is so dreadful.  Amid this environment the girl lives.  She studies her lessons in school and at the library.  Her mother constantly urges her to give up school and go to work but an uncle who furnishes her meager supply of dresses, shoes, coats and hats, says it would only make her father feel that he could give still less to the family’s support and so she continues to attend.  Every evening she helps her mother and on Saturday works hard for a neighbor with only a pittance for pay.