to be managed by the girls
themselves. Because of this possibility it is thought best that every
club for girls, especially for the younger girls, should have a guardian
or a secretary of older years. Whatever rules are made, say, for
instance, by the Young Women's Christian Association, in the fundamental
plans for societies of girls, we may be sure they have been devised by
people who are good, and who desire the best for the girls, and who
understand the whole situation and speak and act from this knowledge.

It may be that the girl who will entertain the bold idea of forming a
club or society is not by any means the one who most needs the club. She
thinks of it because some happy circumstance has developed in her a
power of initiative, the courage or instinct for beginning something
new. It takes courage sometimes to undertake an absolutely new work; and
the girl who has been always helped, never told to go ahead and do
things for herself, will not have developed that power. The ability to
start things can be hypnotized out of anybody; the faculty for it, if
once possessed, can be deadened or suppressed beyond the last degree of
vitality. To take the first step is a matter of life or death with such
a long suppressed nature; but that one step over, the crushed vitality
springs strangely to life and then every step is easier. Then the
beautiful experience lies before you of constantly growing life;
faculties that you hardly knew you possessed spring into being. This is
growth, and growth is the only life.

There will sometimes be in the village one girl who cherishes a higher
ideal of conduct than she sees embodied in the life about her. Where did
she get it? Perhaps from a mother who, immersed in her home cares and
burdens, has taken little part in the affairs in the town. She in turn
received from her mother delicate thoughts that have vanished from the
village when a lower standard of manners came in with certain new and
less cultivated people. In this new atmosphere the daughter has tried to
live and has been mostly alone. Lack of companionship has made her
unsocial and somewhat unbending. Her mind lacks swift response because
she has had no chance to practise swiftness of response in conversation
and repartee. Moreover, she has not the influence among the girls that
she ought to have because they take her search for better forms of
conduct for self-conceit; they consider her proud and stiff and
priggish; those