There is still another division of this irresponsible class, who build up frenzied existences for themselves in all sorts of outside activities.  They plunge headlong into each new proposition for pleasure or social service only to desert it as something more novel and exciting and, for the instant, popular, appears.  Steady, intelligent standing by an undertaking through its ups and downs, its dull seasons and its unpopular phases, they are incapable of.  Their efforts have no relation to an intelligently conceived purpose.  With them may be grouped those women who, by their canonization of the unimportant, construct heavily burdened but utterly fruitless lives.  They laboriously pad out their days with trivial things, vanities, shams, and shadows, to which they give the serious undivided attention which should be bestowed only on real enterprises.

There are others who seek soporifics, release from a hearty tackling of their individual situations, in absorbing work, a work which perhaps fills their minds, but which is mere occupation—­something to make them forget—­not an art for art’s sake, not labor for its useful fruits, but a protective, separating shield to shut out the insistent demands of life in the place where they find themselves.

All of these women are rightfully classed as irresponsible, whether they are moved by vanity, indolence, purposelessness, social blindness, or, most pitiful, a sense of the emptiness of life unattended by the imagination which reveals the sources from which life is filled.  No one of them is building a “House of Life” for herself.  They are building gimcrack palaces, gingerbread cottages, structures which the first full blast of life will level to the ground.

These women are not peculiar to city or to country.  They are scattered nation-wide.  You find them on farms and in mansions, in offices and in academic halls.  In startling contrast there exists almost under the very eaves of the roofs which shelter them a vast and pitiful group of friendless children,—­the deserted babe, the “little mother,” the boys and girls running wild on side streets in every village in our land and in every slum in the cities, the factory child, the shop girl who has no home.  Let us remember that a goodly percentage of those at work have homes and that they are engaged in a stimulating, if hard, effort to “help,” that they have the steadying consciousness that they are needed.  Nevertheless, this mass of youth is on the whole in an unnatural position—­an antisocial relation.

Society can never run rightfully until all its members are performing their natural functions.  No woman, whatever her condition, can escape her obligation to youth without youth suffering, and without suffering herself.  One of the crying needs of to-day is a crusade, a jar, which will force upon our free women the friendless children of the country, give them some sense of the undeniable relation they bear to them, show them that they are in a sense the cause of this pathetic group and that it is their work to relieve it.