in the spirit of the place, no respect for order, no respect for
a regular occupation. "I cannot work at home"--one hears the cry often
enough. It is not always because of this atmosphere of helter-skelter
activity. It is often because of something worse,--an atmosphere of
slothful, pleasure-loving indifference to activities of all kinds, or
one of tacit or expressed discontent with the burdens and the
limitations which are an inescapable part of the Business of Being a
Woman.

The problems connected with a girl's desire to be of social service
are even more difficult. There is a curious blindness or indifference
in our town and country districts to social needs. There is still
alive the notion that sending flowers and jellies to the hospital,
distributing old clothes wisely, and packing generous Christmas
baskets meet all obligations. Social service--of which one may, and
generally does, hear a great deal in the women's clubs--is vaguely
supposed to be something which has to do with great cities and factory
towns, not with the small community. Yet one reason that social
problems are so acute in great groups of men and women is that they
are so poorly met in small and scattered groups. There is the same
need of industrial training, of efficient schools, of books, of
neighborliness, of innocent amusements, of finding opportunities for
the exceptional child, of looking after the adenoids and teeth, of
segregating the tubercular, of doing all the scores of social services
in the small town as in the great. Work is really more hopeful there
because there is some possibility of knowing approximately _all_ the
cases, which is never possible in the city. And yet how far from
general it is to find anything like organized efforts at real social
service in the small community. If a girl serves in such a community,
it is because she has the parts of a pioneer--and few have.

It is not the girl who, having a home, yet is homeless, who is
responsible for her situation. Her necessity is to see herself acting
as a responsible and useful factor in an intelligent plan. If the
family does not present itself to her as a grave, dignified
undertaking on which several persons dear to her have embarked, how
can she be expected to tie to it? The old phrases which she may hear
now and then--"the honor of the family"--"duty to parents"--only savor
of cant to her. They have no pricking vitality in them. She gets no
acute reaction from them. She