"Oh, tell me to-night," cried a college freshman once to her
President, "which is the right side and which is the wrong side of
this Andover question about eschatology?" The young girl is
impatient of open questions, and irritated at her inability to
answer them. Neither can she believe that the first headlong zest
with which she throws herself into society, athletics, into
everything which comes in her way, can ever fail. But her elders
know, looking on, that our American girl, the commrade of her
parents and of her brothers and their friends, brought up from
babyhood in the eager talk of politics and society, of religious
belief, of public action, of social responsibility--that this
typical girl, with her quick sympathies, her clear head, her warm
heart, her outreaching hands, will not permanently be satisfied
or self-respecting, though she have the prettiest dresses and
hats in town, or the most charming of dinners, dances, and teas.
Unless there comes to her, and comes early, the one chief happiness
of life,--a marriage of comradeship,--she must face for herself
the question, "What shall I do with my life?"

I recall a superb girl of twenty as I overtook her one winter
morning hurrying along Commonwealth Avenue. She spoke of a
brilliant party at a friend's the previous evening. "But, oh!"
she cried, throwing up her hands in a kind of hopeless impatience,
"tell me what to do. My dancing days are over!" I laughed at her,
"Have you sprained your ankle?" But I saw I had made a mistake
when she added, "It is no laughing matter. I have been out three
years. I have not done what they expected of me," with a flush
and a shrug, "and there is a crowd of nice girls coming on this
winter; and anyway, I am so tired of going to teas and ball-games
and assemblies! I don't care the least in the world for foreign