drifting along without aim or purpose, just letting the days slip past,
is not enough. The friends of the drifting girl must help her find her
work and her mission and inspire her with the belief that she has both.

And there are the girls who drift because strong, capable, efficient
mothers cannot conceive of them as anything but "little girls," cannot
realize that they have grown up and continue to plan for them, to make
all their decisions and choices as they did when their daughters, now
twenty, were children of ten. This sort of girl needs sympathy and help,
for in the years when her own powers should be developing they sleep.
Her mother, though with the best motives and intentions in the world, is
compelling her to drift through the years that should be filled with
experience and effort and when the time comes that she must be left to
herself and depend upon her own resources, her state is pitiful. The
girl in the later teens and early twenties needs direction, advice and
counsel but if she is to be saved from drifting she must learn to think
for herself.

There is another girl who drifts, not aimlessly about, but downstream.
She has lost her ideals. She has ignored the still small voice that
tried to save her, until now it seldom speaks. One and another of her
friends have been with her in the current but have left her and made
their way to safety. Only those from whom at first she shrank are with
her now. She has reached the place where the current is strong and rapid
and escape is doubtful. Her mother still believes her good, her father
still trusts her, but before long they will have to know. She began by
saying not "I meant to," but "I didn't mean to, I didn't think it was
wrong," not "I will do it tomorrow," but "I will never do it again." But
she did it again and yet again. She let go of the help that the church
offered and gave and went to the pleasure parks on Sunday. She let go of