It was a great day when Olga came home with her yellow envelope and laid the money on the table.  Not a cent would her father take.  “No, Olga,” he said, “the money is yours.  You shall keep the account of it and show it to your father.  You shall buy the new bed for your room and the chairs.  Your mother wants the house made pretty.  Perhaps you will help.  That will be very good.  But the money is yours.”  No one seeing the girl’s face as she related her father’s words could doubt the appreciation in her heart.  Her girl friends had “paid their board” and she had expected to do the same.  That night she refurnished the house in her dreams and the memory of that dream room of her mother’s, with paper on the wall and rugs on the floor, helped her save her money until the dream came true.

Olga is indeed a privileged girl.  She has parents wise enough to have given her the best equipment possible for the work she wanted to do.  She has her own money and may dress as well as any girl in the office.  She has an object for saving what she can and knows the joy of helping to make home beautiful.  The suburban church is the center of many of her pleasures, for it is alive and the young people in it know how to enjoy themselves.  She is loved and sheltered in a real home.  She can live a normal, useful, happy life with opportunity for promotion in her work and an object for her ambition.  She has health, sane pleasures and good friends.  Any such girl is indeed privileged.

When one sees her going happily to work he is forced to think of the other girl, her homeless boarding place, chance friends, pitiful economies and few pleasures; the girl who has forgotten what it means to be sheltered and protected, if she ever knew, to whom love is a myth or a dream.

Perhaps one of the happiest of the privileged girls was the one who took me to her room on a beautiful June day to show me her cedar chest, her gowns and the gifts already beginning to come. The day was near.  The young man whom she was to marry was honest and fine, in business with his father and hoping to make the firm a greater success than ever, as the years should pass.  The girl was just twenty-one.  After high school, a mother who was not strong needed her help and she had made that home a center of enjoyment for three years.  Surrounded by the loving appreciation of parents and brothers, her life was filled with happiness.  Now in a few days she would go across the street to the house built for her and furnished simply and well, with the articles which he and she had chosen on the long shopping tours during the months past.  She was in every sense a privileged girl.