The Girl Who Pays Her Way.
“You probably have no conception of your importance as a unit. Few of us have,” writes Margaret E. Sangster in Woman’s Home Companion for July. “Yet society is so constructed that we depend on one another, and, without quite understanding it, we constantly assist in molding the opinions and shaping the conduct of people whom we may never meet, and who apparently never approach our neighborhood. For instance: “I knew intimately a young girl who was born in a tenement house on the East Side of New York, who scrambled up as best she could thru a meager and poverty-stricken childhood, working as a cash girl in a department store when she was fourteen, and later earning her livelihood in a tobacco factory. Her work when she first became one of my girls was very hard and unwholesome. Her face was pale, her fingers were stained, her hours were long, and her weekly wage, most of it given to her mother, was a sum that many girls in well-to-do families spend on candies and chiffons without a thought of economy. But she had a dainty air, was fastidiously neat, arranged her hair very prettily and was gentle and attractive in speech and manner. She had the sweet and refined air of a lady. “How to account for it would have been a puzzle had I known girls of only one condition and training. I asked no questions, yet I found out without much trouble what I wanted to know. My little friend was spending a Sunday with me, and she said, incidentally, ‘When I was a “Fresh Air,” the year I was ten, I saw a young girl who must have been fifteen. She was the loveliest thing you could imagine. She used to drive down the road past the farm where we were staying, and I knew she was going to the train to meet her father. Often she stopped with her mother and visited a little with us, and I made up my mind that I would be like that girl. I tried to talk as she did. I made her my pattern. Afterward, when I was a “cash,” I sometimes saw her in the store, and O! what a joy it was when at last she came to the Settlement and sang for us in the evenings. That girl has been my ideal.’ * “ ‘Did you ever tell her about it?’ I asked. “ ‘I have never spoken a single word to her,’ was the reply. ‘I don’t want to. I like better to think of her as a star or a beautiful flower. She belongs to me and I belong to her, and if we were acquainted maybe it wouldn’t be so perfect.’ ”