The girl really indifferent to _everything_, unless she be ill, does not
exist. There is a point of contact, a line of interest. The girl
indifferent to religion, to the work of the church, to her studies, may
be keenly alive to the call of other things--her friends, plans for her
future, all lines of social life. Last summer I met a girl of seventeen,
indifferent to all interests save nature study. She had failed in the
languages, was defeated by mathematics, but could sit hours in the woods
waiting for a tiny bird, or a squirrel to pose for her. She had made
some remarkable photographs and tinted them beautifully.

The usual social interests of the girls of her age bored her. Her mother
stated to sympathetic friends that the girl was hopeless, indifferent to
every plan for her future. The girl in turn said half defiantly, that
she did not care, and it made no difference to her what people thought
of her. It would have been so easy had the right guidance been given, to
help the girl see the great need a real naturalist would one day feel
for the languages, to show her that she had some social duties and to
let them be as few as possible, giving her every opportunity to develop
her special talents and interests. But the wise guiding hand was not
present and so the girl grew hard, indifferent, and created an
atmosphere of constant friction.

Into a night court in one of the cities there was brought an exceedingly
pretty girl just out of her teens. She seemed wholly indifferent to any
moral appeal and conscience was evidently dead. She would make no
promises for future good-behavior, she showed no evidence of shame. She
was unmoved by the matron's words of appeal. When she found that she was
to be detained through the day she begged the woman probation officer
to go with her to her home saying that her mother was ill and she feared
the result if she did not return as usual. With a great desire to