or fall
wardrobe and return to their home towns, where their acquaintances are
quite without suspicion of the methods they have employed to secure the
much-admired costumes brought from the city. Often an unattached country
girl, who has come to live in a city, has gradually fallen into a
vicious life from sheer lack of social restraint. Such a girl, when
living in a smaller community, realized that good behavior was a
protective measure and that any suspicion of immorality would quickly
ruin her social standing; but when removed from such surveillance, she
hopes to be able to pass from her regular life to an irregular one and
back again before the fact has been noted, quite as many young men are
trying to do.

Perhaps no young woman is more exposed to temptation of this sort than
the one who works in an office where she may be the sole woman employed
and where the relation to her employer and to her fellow-clerks is
almost on a social basis. Many office girls have taken "business
courses" in their native towns and have come to the city in search of
the large salaries which have no parallels at home. Such a position is
not only new to the individual, but it is so recent an outcome of modern
business methods, that it has not yet been conventionalized. The girl is
without the wholesome social restraint afforded by the companionship of
other working-women and her isolation in itself constitutes a danger. An
investigation disclosed that a startling number of Chicago girls had
found their positions through advertisements and had no means of
ascertaining the respectability of their employers. In addition to this,
the girls who seek such positions are sometimes vain and pretentious,
and will take any sort of office work because it seems to them "more
ladylike." A girl of this sort came to Chicago from the country three
years ago at the age of seventeen and secured a position as a
stenographer with a large firm of lawyers. She was pretty and
attractive, and in her desire to see more of the wonderful city to which
she had come, she accepted many invitations to dinners and theatres from
a younger member of the firm. The other girls in the office,
representing the more capable type of business women, among whom a
careful code of conduct is developing, although at present it is often
manifested only by the social ostracism of the one of their number who
has broken the conventions, protested against her conduct, first to the
girl