Great ambition, hopes and dreams were packed into that trunk and the day when she should graduate and come back to teach in the high school seemed near.  Jack and Bessie and Newton were in her plans for using the money she should earn when those four short years were over.

[Illustration:  SHE WAS FULL OF AMBITION AND WILLING TO WORK]

Looking at her sweet, fresh face so full of happiness one knew her to be a privileged girl.  All through high school she had had her purpose clear, her studies were a pleasure, her simple good times were enjoyed to the full and life, every moment of it, was worth the living.  When I saw her lock the trunk and excitedly instruct the expressman as to just how it must be carried, I had a sudden vision of the thousands of girls, with happy faces filled with anticipation of all that is wrapped up in that one word, college.  A great army of privileged girls, they are.  One cannot help wishing that he might feel sure that when they leave those college halls it might be with a deep appreciation and real sympathetic understanding of the other girls who have turned their eyes with longing toward four years more of study and fun, but whose feet were obliged to walk in other pathways.  They are so dependent upon one another, these girls who can go to college and the other girls who cannot go.  They do not know it now but neither girl can ever come to her best until the privileged girl sees and understands.

One of the most interesting of the privileged girls I met one morning going to work.  It was her third month in the office.  “One of the finest in the city.  There’s a chance to work up, and me for the top,” she told me, her face beaming.  Her father had come across the sea from Sweden when a boy.  Long generations of honest folk were behind him and he made good in the new land.  He saved a good share of the wages he made in the bicycle shop, studied with a correspondence school and assumed more and more responsible positions with higher wages.  At last he was able to build a house for his young family, at the end of the car line where the children had room to play and the cow and chickens kept the boys busy and taught them to work.  Olga was the eldest and it was a proud night for the family when she graduated from grammar school.  Going home on the trolley her father determined that she should have the desire of her heart and go for two years to business college.  There was great rejoicing on the part of the family when he made his decision known and Olga hardly slept that night.  When the two years were over the principal of the school had said such fine things of her work that Olga had blushed to hear them.  More than that, he offered her the best position open to his students.  He was a little astonished the next morning when Olga’s father came down to ask in his careful English regarding the character of the men in the office where his daughter was to work.  To Olga’s great joy he was able to satisfy the father to whom the matter was of enough importance to make him put on his best clothes and take half a day off, in order to make sure that all was right.