Often a girl thinks only of what she will do with her own summer without thinking of what she will do with her mother’s or her father’s summer.  For nine or ten months they have been thinking of what they could do for her.  Sometimes girls do not realize the actual need of help and of companionship which those at home feel, and the older people are too unselfish to force this need upon their juniors.  Between the unselfishness of those who are older and the self-centredness of those who are younger, there is often sad havoc made in a home.  A girl who, after a year’s absence and all that has been done for her, can’t adjust herself to those who need her, has still something to learn.

If older people cannot do without the buoyancy of the young, the young cannot very well afford to forget the mother and father who have much, although no word may be didactically spoken, to teach them.  Let the girl take her summer not only as an opportunity to grow closer to her family but also as a chance to learn home-making, to train herself in the practical things of the home.  This practical training is often a very valuable supplement to the school work.  The time is passed when the learned woman who is unable to do anything for herself is the ideal—­if she ever has been that.  The inability to make a home for herself, to do all the necessary things daintily, detracts from a woman’s power.  In practical ways a woman should be both dainty and capable.  Parents, as well as girls, sometimes forget or do not clearly recognize the fact that no school, no college, can take the place of the home, that schools are not primarily schools in home-making, but rather schools of general education.  The summer is a good time for the girl to find her place again in the home life, and for both parents and children to rejoice in the pleasures of the home—­pleasures and opportunities which no institutional life can give.

XI

FROM THE SCHOOL TO THE GIRL

What the school is able to do for the girl depends very largely upon the girl herself.  The majority of people with whom she comes in contact do not take that into consideration, and the school is held unfairly responsible for the girl.  All any school can do is to use the material it finds.  Some one has said, with harsh but true emphasis, that a college does not make a fool, it simply helps in the development of one.  As an illustration of its limitations, a school sends out two girls from the same class; one girl it is proud to have taken as a type, the other it is sorry to have represent it.  Yet both have been under exactly the same influence.  Students do not realize how fearfully at their mercy a school is, or that, so far as reputation is concerned, it is they who make or mar its credit.