Oftentimes when a girl fails to adjust herself to the home life, her family and friends feel that she is rather selfish in her desire to carry out her own aims rather than to give them up for new demands.  Frequently the family is as much to blame for not realizing that the girl needs to be helped back into the old life as the girl is for not being able to help herself.  In the home the spirit of team-play is much needed.  Quite as much as the girl, the family has a lesson to learn in the art of adjustment and in remembering that this grown-up child isn’t just the same individual she was when she went away several years ago.  They need to realize that the girl may be able to give more to the home life than she ever did before, but that it will be given in a somewhat different way.

While she is learning the difficult art of finding her place again, a great deal depends upon the individual girl, not only in the home but in the community at large.  Sometimes she needs to be reminded that although she may have had more advantages than those left at home, that doesn’t necessarily make her a superior person.  A girl who is inclined either to pity or to admire herself too greatly should give herself a vigorous shaking.  In the long run she will find it easier to do that on her own account than to have others do it for her.  The friends at home, or in the church, or in the town, with education of a different kind coming to them, may have quite as much and more to give her than she to give them.  One indicator of a really cultivated woman is her power to adapt herself to the circumstances in which she is placed.  A gentlewoman never calls attention to the difference between herself and somebody else.  The woman of broad culture is the one who makes everybody feel at home with her.  If a girl’s education has been worth anything at all, it should give her not a superior, set-aside feeling, but a desire to be more friendly and useful wherever she may be, and, not placing too much stress on externals, to look for essentials, to get the full value from every person and from every experience with which she comes in contact.

Girls go to so many different kinds of homes that it is unlikely that they will meet the same sorts of difficulties.  There is the girl who goes into the society home, where it is impossible for her to carry out her ideals without conflict with its social standards.  On the other hand, there is the girl who goes into the very simple home where all the stress is upon the domestic side of life.  And there is the girl who has to provide part of the family income.  Very likely she has the hardest problem of all.  She enters upon some new work, and nine times out of ten the way is not made easy for her; she is a novice with all the hardships that come to the novice.  Perhaps in the beginning she has met a very real perplexity in hardly knowing what line of work to take up.  She has no particular interest, no especial talent,