The strong girls of high ideals are with us and it is a comfort and a
joy to look into their young faces so full of promise and of courage.
We find them among the very rich and among the very poor as well as
among the girls who live in comfort with neither riches nor poverty to
make things exceedingly hard.

Irene is one of the girls who amidst poverty and sin has been able to
keep her ideals high. Her home is poor because her father, a mechanic,
who _can_ earn good wages is a hard drinker. Her mother, an honest,
clean, hard working woman, is nervous and fretful, worn out by the hard
things she has had to meet. It is a quarrelsome household and when the
father comes home intoxicated the law is obliged often to interfere. One
of the boys was expelled from school because his language is so
dreadful. Amid this environment the girl lives. She studies her lessons
in school and at the library. Her mother constantly urges her to give up
school and go to work but an uncle who furnishes her meager supply of
dresses, shoes, coats and hats, says it would only make her father feel
that he could give still less to the family's support and so she
continues to attend. Every evening she helps her mother and on Saturday
works hard for a neighbor with only a pittance for pay.

The school and the Sunday-school have furnished all her ideals and she
is holding on to them while her father taunts her with being a "saint,"
and the girls of the neighborhood tempt her to join with them in the
things she knows are wrong. The hour on Sunday is a great help and on
Monday she loses herself in her lessons and enjoys her school friends.
She is only sixteen and she cannot help hoping that things will be
better soon. But Wednesday there is another dreadful quarrel, bitter
words and her father's drunken threats. When late at night all is quiet
and she creeps into bed beside her little sister, her ideals seem far,