the same oversight to their daughters, but the entire situation is so
unlike that of their own peasant girlhoods that, discouraged by their
inability to judge it, they make no attempt to understand their
daughters' lives. The girls, realizing this inability on the part of
their mothers, elated by that sense of independence which the first
taste of self-support always brings, sheltered from observation during
certain hours, are almost as free from social control as is the
traditional young man who comes up from the country to take care of
himself in a great city. These immigrant parents are, of course, quite
unable to foresee that while a girl feels a certain restraint of public
opinion from the tenement house neighbors among whom she lives, and
while she also responds to the public opinion of her associates in a
factory where she works, there is no public opinion at all operating as
a restraint upon her in the hours which lie between the two, occupied in
the coming and going to work through the streets of a city large enough
to offer every opportunity for concealment. So much of the recreation
which is provided by commercial agencies, even in its advertisements,
deliberately plays upon the interest of sex because it is under such
excitement and that of alcohol that money is most recklessly spent. The
great human dynamic, which it has been the long effort of centuries to
limit to family life, is deliberately utilized for advertising purposes,
and it is inevitable that many girls yield to such allurements.

On the other hand, one is filled with admiration for the many immigrant
girls who in the midst of insuperable difficulties resist all
temptations. Such admiration was certainly due Olga, a tall, handsome
girl, a little passive and slow, yet with that touch of dignity which a
continued mood of introspection so often lends to the young. Olga had
been in Chicago for a year living with an aunt who, when she returned to
Sweden, placed her niece in a boarding-house which she knew to be