The most essential thing for a woman to understand is that her business is not to order her daughter’s life, but to assist that daughter to shape it herself.  She should be prepared to say to her:  “The most interesting and important thing in the world for you is to work out your own particular life.  You must build it from the place where you stand and with the materials in your hands.  Nobody else ever stood in your particular place or ever will stand in one identical; nobody ever has or can possess the same materials.  You alone can fuse the elements.  Hold your place; do not try to shift into the place that another occupies.  Keep your eye on what you have to work with, not on what somebody else has.  The ultimate result, the originality, flavor, distinction, usefulness of your life, depend on the care, the reverence, and the intelligence with which you work up and out from where you are and with what you have.”

It is only the woman who is prepared to say something like that to her daughter, to help her to see it, and to rise to it that has brought into her home the spirit of to-day.

Where there is failure at any one of these points, and if one fails, all probably will, since they are obvious elements in the liberal view of life, the girl must go forth if her life is to go progressively on.  She must seek work, less for the sake of work than for the sake of life.  To remain where she is, unproductive in a group which does not recognize the calls of the present world and where another person—­for the mother who tries to force the individuality becomes another person—­insists on shaping her course,—­to do this is to quench the spirit, stop the very breath of life.

The girl goes forth to seek work.  She has almost invariably the idea that work outside the home has less of drudgery in it, i.e. less routine and meanness, more excitement.  She is unprepared for the years of steady grinding labor which she must go through to earn her bread in any trade or profession.  She learns that work is work whether done in kitchen, sewing room, countinghouse, studio, or editor’s sanctum, and all that keeps the operations which consume the bulk of the worker’s time in any of these places from being drudgery is that he keeps before him the end for which they are performed.  The first disillusionment comes, then, when she faces the necessity of a long steady pull for years if she is to “arrive.”

A second comes when she finds she must prove to a busy, driven world that she is worth its attention; she must do more than simply knock for admission and declare her fealty to its ideals.  She realizes sooner or later that she is an outsider and must delve her way in.  No sapper works harder to make his trench than most young women do to make stable places for themselves in strange communities.