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The Girl and Her Religion by Margaret Slattery
page 15 of 134 (11%)
the city. Then three small baskets were filled with pansies. These went
to three old ladies in the factory section of the village. She told me
they were "the sweetest old ladies" and "dear friends" of hers. She
seemed to take real delight in making the baskets beautiful. I saw her
later in the day galloping off through the woods on her horse, her face
glowing with health and happiness. In the afternoon she spent an hour on
German which she said was her "hopeless study," but I found her reading
German folk lore with ease. She was familiar with the best things in
literature, was intensely interested in art and revealed unusual
knowledge without any evidence of precociousness. She was just a normal,
healthy, natural girl, well-born, well-bred, a girl with every
advantage. When I said good-night to her in her lovely room and thought
of her protected, sheltered life, I wondered how she might be helped to
know into what pleasant places her lot had fallen and how she might come
to understand and do in later years her full duty toward the other
fifteen-year-old girl who that day made paper boxes, feathers, flowers
or shirtwaists, toiled in the laundries or the cotton factory, or walked
with heavy heart from place to place searching for work. They are
dependent upon one another, these two. They do not know it now, but if
each is to be her best, they must know.

How to lead her daughter to value and help this _other girl_, that sweet
mother told me as we talked in the library that night she felt was her
great problem. "We women are responsible for so much," she said, "and
our daughters will be responsible for still more. We must help them
estimate things at their right value." With that thought and spirit in
her mother's heart the girl I had watched all day with such pleasure
seemed doubly privileged.

Last September I saw another privileged girl. She showed me her trunk
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