Girls grow impatient with themselves when they wouldn’t be impatient with a little child.  Yet the mind has to be trained even as we train a child; it has to be brought back and back, again and again to the thing to be done.  After the asking of a simple question, oftentimes a whole class will look confounded, because they have some strange notion that thinking means getting hold of something very far away and difficult to grasp.  All that the first effort in thought denotes is taking a hold of that which is nearest and following it up.  It is the old story of Theseus following his clue of thread, the slender thing in his hand, by which he was guided out of the labyrinth and to the broad sea of adventure.

There are difficulties in the doing of any work that is worth while.  It would be a poor adviser who painted the student’s way as a path of roses.  First and foremost, one’s own inertia interferes with the joy of work.  Some one has defined the lazy man as one who doesn’t want to do anything at all, and the indolent man as one who doesn’t want to do anything that he doesn’t want to do.  Then, too, there are certain allurements and distractions in school life which are a hindrance to our joy in an intellectual task.  And there is the very natural disinclination to the drudgery involved in all hard labour.  No work that is worth while is without drudgery.  Lack of encouragement from older people is one serious difficulty some girls have to meet.  There is a type of older person who is sure that using the mind will harm that precious article.  And, finally, there is our inexperience, our own lack of comprehension, our own purposeless and formless lives.

Joy in work should not be altogether conditional upon one’s sense of ease or upon what is called success.  Seeming success is not always success.  Often the most valuable lessons come from failures.  Robert Browning, the poet, speaks again and again of the noble uses of failure.  Let me quote one stanza from one of his greatest poems, “Rabbi Ben Ezra”: 

    “Then, welcome each rebuff
    That turns earth’s smoothness rough,
    Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go! 
    Be our joys three-parts pain! 
    Strive and hold cheap the strain;
    Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!”

You can’t learn to walk if you haven’t tumbled down a good deal in doing it.  It is often failure that means ultimate success.  Of course if a girl keeps on saying:  “Oh, what’s the use?” about everything she does and all her failures, there isn’t any use.  In weak moments that sort of thing can be said of every great and worth-while experience, of love, of joy, of sorrow, of work.  But a girl who allows herself to take this attitude is a “quitter,” and doesn’t know the first principles of playing the game.