For the girl with means there is the chance for travel, a splendid opportunity to cultivate many virtues of which the young traveller seldom thinks:  patience, adaptability, seeing the bright side of things.  Travelling may be made a very important part of education.  It is too bad that some people of limited horizon take it simply as a chance to aggrandize themselves, something to boast about and with which to bore their friends by repeated accounts of what they did “abroad.”  The great Doctor Samuel Johnson, the compiler of the famous dictionary and author of “Rasselas,” heartily disliked young travellers, for, he said, “They go too raw to make any great remarks.”  Travelling, if it is what it should be, is an educational opening.  In this way can be gained a background for history, for literature, for sociology, and a vivid and living knowledge of geography.  Merely running about with a guide-book will not achieve these ends, although a guide-book is a very important asset:  sympathy, trying to understand what one sees, will.  Travelling takes away provincialism because it broadens the outlook.  In a very real sense the world becomes one’s home.

The girl who is not able to move about or actually travel may travel in books.  She should be ashamed to read what is harmful or merely cheap, but further than that it may not much matter.  Let her read the Little Books, if she wishes, and the Great Little Books.  As surely as the magnet swings towards the pole will the Great Little Books take her to the Great Big Books.  She will be drawn on and up in her reading, and will have cultivated a love for reading which is far more important than perfunctory knowledge of the classics.

Just as any books that are good point towards books that are better, so should the good work of a girl’s school year be turning her mind towards the future and her work as a mature woman.  In the summer she has time to assimilate all she has done, to get her bearings, and to plan wisely for the year, or years, to come.  For a girl of strong physique the summer vacation gives an opportunity to add towards what she is going to do eventually; to specialize in some line of work, to take a library, or scientific, course.  Many girls, however, who wish to spend their summer in this fashion ought not to consider it, for they are not strong enough.  It is well for them to remember that it is the quality of work that counts rather than the quantity.  Often the quality of a girl’s work for an ensuing school year depends upon her freedom from study during the summer.  Students should be very sure, if they undertake work in the summer, that it is not done simply from a nervous desire to go on regardless of the quality of the work done.  But for those in perfect health this is an opportunity to try their powers in different ways in order to discover what it is they really wish to do.  A summer so spent may keep many a girl from slipping into teaching just because it seems the only thing she can do.  Such a salvation will be twofold, for it will save not only the girl, but also a profession overcrowded with loveless followers.  There are so many needs to be filled by a woman’s work that it is her duty to look for some vocation for which she is truly adapted, to get out of the ruts of those professions into which women flock because they have no initiative.