room and the chairs.
Your mother wants the house made pretty. Perhaps you will help. That
will be very good. But the money is yours." No one seeing the girl's
face as she related her father's words could doubt the appreciation in
her heart. Her girl friends had "paid their board" and she had expected
to do the same. That night she refurnished the house in her dreams and
the memory of that dream room of her mother's, with paper on the wall
and rugs on the floor, helped her save her money until the dream came
true.
Olga is indeed a privileged girl. She has parents wise enough to have
given her the best equipment possible for the work she wanted to do. She
has her own money and may dress as well as any girl in the office. She
has an object for saving what she can and knows the joy of helping to
make home beautiful. The suburban church is the center of many of her
pleasures, for it is alive and the young people in it know how to enjoy
themselves. She is loved and sheltered in a real home. She can live a
normal, useful, happy life with opportunity for promotion in her work
and an object for her ambition. She has health, sane pleasures and good
friends. Any such girl is indeed _privileged_.
When one sees her going happily to work he is forced to think of the
other girl, her homeless boarding place, chance friends, pitiful
economies and few pleasures; the girl who has forgotten what it means to
be sheltered and protected, if she ever knew, to whom love is a myth or
a dream.
Perhaps one of the happiest of the privileged girls was the one who took
me to her room on a beautiful June day to show me her cedar chest, her
gowns and the gifts already beginning to come. _The_ day was near. The
young man whom she was to marry was honest and fine, in business with
his father and hoping to make the firm a greater success than ever, as
the years should pass. The girl was just twenty-one. After high school,
a mother who was not strong needed her help and she had made that home a
center of enjoyment for three years. Surrounded by the loving
appreciation of parents and brothers, her life was filled with
happiness. Now in a few days she would go across the street to the house
built for her and furnished simply and well, with the articles which he
and she had chosen on the long shopping tours during the months past.
She was in every sense a privileged girl.
The _other girl_ saw her married. She was looking forward to her own
wedding da
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