ccidents that usually displease, please, and raise esteem and
wonder higher. Beauty without grace is the head without the body.
Beauty without expression tires." Of course such considerations can
hardly come with full force to the young girl herself, who feels aged
at eighteen, and imagines that the troubles and problems of life and
thought are hers already. "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 comrade 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 missions, and," with a stamp, "I am not going
slumming among the Italians. I have too much respect for the Italians.
And what shall I do with the rest of my life?" That was a frank
statement of what any girl of brains or conscience feels, with more or
less