The Girl and Her Religion by Margaret Slattery
page 15 of 134 (11%)
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 |
|