your day mostly at your own disposal, you learnt that a free life is far
more difficult, and therefore far nobler, than a life under direction.

It was pleasant at first to be able to carry out your own fancies, but you
awoke after a while to the fact that you were not spending holidays but
living your real life; and then the thought must have come, if you had any
stuff in you, "I must anyhow live my life; am I living it nobly?"

How can you live a noble life? Bacon gives us, perhaps, the best answer
when he says that "the end of all learning should be the Glory of God and
the Relief of Man's Estate." Shall this be the result of your school
learning? Others can speak to you from experience, as I cannot, of the
glory and happiness of a life spent in the Relief of Man's Estate: I would
speak to you of a preliminary stage of work for that relief, of some of
the difficulties which beset girls on first leaving school, and owing to
which so much noble aspiration and unselfish enthusiasm run to waste.

I believe one of the main difficulties is _friction at home_; a difficulty
on which I the rather dwell because it is harder, for those who know you
personally, to speak of it without irritating you, or else criticizing
your home. How is this home difficulty met? Some meet it by leaving
home,--which reminds me of the minister who said in his sermon, "This is a
serious difficulty in our belief, my brethren; let us look it boldly in
the face,--and pass it by." Some lay themselves open to _Punch's_ attack,
when he depicts a girl saying, "Mamma has become quite blind now, and papa
is paralytic, and it makes the house so dull that I'm going to be a
hospital nurse."

Many who are too clear-sighted to neglect home duties, yet leave this
difficulty unfaced, in that they look for all the pleasure of their life