-------
Dress budget for three years $218.61
Dress budget for one year $72.87

These various budgets are given that we may be sure to have some
approach to a standard for each part of the country. But it is of course
possible that none of them will meet the case of a great many of the
girls. However, the hope is that they may at least give the suggestion
that it is a useful thing to make such a list in order that a girl may
thus be able to see at a glance what she is doing with her money; and
when she is looking forward into the year ahead she may feel an
inspiration to plan beforehand and thus forestall the disaster that so
surely follows poor investment. The first principle of efficiency is to
put in a pin, as it were, at a certain point, so that one may see what
point has been reached and so be helped to decide whether it can be
surpassed another time.

Let this chapter be a help to put in such a pin, to set something like
an ideal of what is possible in the matter of reasonable dress. It may
also aid the daughter to know what she may fairly expect her father to
supply for her needs. It may help the well-meaning father to realize
what he must do if his children are able to hold up their heads in the
community. The rank of the head of the family is often reckoned by the
appearance of the wife and child. Some of these lists are evidently made
for a girl whose father may be marked by the daughter's dress as a man
of less position and generosity and fairness than he imagines himself to
be. That state of things can easily be corrected. On the other hand, the
girl that has time for sewing, and the cleverness and training to do it,
should take delight in making her clothing for herself. Given those
antecedent conditions, the Country Girl's dress will thus be not only
less expensive, but also better adapted to herself, and more charming
because more individual.

CHAPTER XVIII

FOUNDING A HOME

The woman that can in the midst of her rigid daily duties fall on
her knees and thank God for the dim, black forests which are the
eternal fans of nature, for the rain that appeases the thirst of
the birds of the air, and the newly sown seed in the fields, that
can feel amid these natural objects awe, admiration, a sense of
infinite force, of boundless life, of duration that is eterna