The problems connected with a girl’s desire to be of social service are even more difficult.  There is a curious blindness or indifference in our town and country districts to social needs.  There is still alive the notion that sending flowers and jellies to the hospital, distributing old clothes wisely, and packing generous Christmas baskets meet all obligations.  Social service—­of which one may, and generally does, hear a great deal in the women’s clubs—­is vaguely supposed to be something which has to do with great cities and factory towns, not with the small community.  Yet one reason that social problems are so acute in great groups of men and women is that they are so poorly met in small and scattered groups.  There is the same need of industrial training, of efficient schools, of books, of neighborliness, of innocent amusements, of finding opportunities for the exceptional child, of looking after the adenoids and teeth, of segregating the tubercular, of doing all the scores of social services in the small town as in the great.  Work is really more hopeful there because there is some possibility of knowing approximately all the cases, which is never possible in the city.  And yet how far from general it is to find anything like organized efforts at real social service in the small community.  If a girl serves in such a community, it is because she has the parts of a pioneer—­and few have.

It is not the girl who, having a home, yet is homeless, who is responsible for her situation.  Her necessity is to see herself acting as a responsible and useful factor in an intelligent plan.  If the family does not present itself to her as a grave, dignified undertaking on which several persons dear to her have embarked, how can she be expected to tie to it?  The old phrases which she may hear now and then—­“the honor of the family”—­“duty to parents”—­only savor of cant to her.  They have no pricking vitality in them.  She gets no acute reaction from them.  She sees herself merely as an accident in an accidental group, headed nowhere in particular.

What it all amounts to is that the greatest art in the Woman’s Business is using youth.  It is no easy matter.  Youth is a terrible force, confident, selfish, unknowing.  Rarely has it real courage, real interest in aught but itself.  It has all to learn, but it is youth, the most beautiful and hopeful thing in life.  And it is the thing upon which the full development of life for a woman depends.  She must have it always at her side, if she is to know her own full meaning in the scheme of things.  It is part of her tragedy that she fails so often to understand how essential is youth to her as an individual, her happiness and her growth.

The fact that a woman is childless is no reason in the present world why she should be cut off from the developing and ennobling association.  Indeed, the childless woman of to-day, in addition to her obligation to herself, has a peculiar obligation to society in the matter of the friendless child.