The school and the Sunday-school have furnished all her ideals and she is holding on to them while her father taunts her with being a “saint,” and the girls of the neighborhood tempt her to join with them in the things she knows are wrong.  The hour on Sunday is a great help and on Monday she loses herself in her lessons and enjoys her school friends.  She is only sixteen and she cannot help hoping that things will be better soon.  But Wednesday there is another dreadful quarrel, bitter words and her father’s drunken threats.  When late at night all is quiet and she creeps into bed beside her little sister, her ideals seem far, far away, out of her reach, but she says, “I must reach them, I must, I will.”  And so day after day she presents to all the waves of discouragement and evil the strong, granite-like determination that will not let the tide come in.

Strong as she is she does not excel another girl surrounded by extravagant wealth, praised, flattered and pampered, trained to think of one thing supremely, and that herself.  But she is a girl of high ideals.  When a little child her old nurse told her the stories and taught her the prayers that she never forgets and helped her feel a deep sympathy for all who suffer and have need.  A fine young uncle who has used his wealth to comfort the old and save the sick, told her many a tale that stirred her soul, and her admiration for the young man of millions who worked as hard every day as any man in his office but never for himself, helped in forming her own ideals.  And so she reads and studies, dreams and plans the good she will do some day, meanwhile helping in every way open to her and standing firmly for the things she knows are right, resisting with granite-like determination the onslaught of the waves of self-indulgence and the tides of wild extravagance and display.

The girl of high ideals is everywhere.  Every school can claim her.  Despite teasing, sneers and laughter, she remains true to her ideals.  She is not a book-worm but she studies, she is not prudish but she is high minded and pure, she has fun but it is wholesome and clean and kind.

She is found in every shop, every department store is aware of her presence.  Honest, attentive, true, interested in her work, following amidst many insidious temptations her own high ideals.

Every college knows her.  She resists the petty sins of college life.  She banishes jealousy and self-assertion.  Snobbishness she will not tolerate.  She seeks no honors save those fairly won.  Keen, alert, pure and true, capable of sacrifice and hard tasks, sympathetic with all need, a lover of true sport and real fun she represents the college girl of high ideals.

Every factory has her among its operatives.  A good worker doing honest work, refusing to allow the stain of coarse jests to touch her, or the temptations which come with low wages and great fatigue to enter her life.  Again and again she has revealed her ideals in moments of disaster and death.  It is hard to find words to express one’s admiration for the factory girl as she holds to her high ideals.