e. They had their clubs; I suppose a
dozen literary clubs, several sewing clubs, several bridge clubs, and
a number of dancing clubs. I think they cared a little more for bridge
than for literature, many of them at least. They took little part in
civic work, though they had done much for the city library and city
hospital. Many girls went to college, to the State Institute, to
Vassar and Smith. They came back to teach and to marry. It was just as
it is everywhere."

Another to whom I put the same question, answered me in a sympathetic
letter full of understanding comment. The mingled devotion, energy,
and blindness of the women the letter described, spoke in its every
line. They built charming homes, reared healthy, active children whom
they educated at any personal sacrifice--all within a circle of eighty
saloons! To offset the saloons they built churches--a church for each
sect--each more gorgeous than its neighbor. It was in building
churches that they showed the "greatest tenacity of purpose." They had
a large temperance organization. It supported a rest room and met
fortnightly to pray "ardently and sincerely." How little this body of
good women sensed their problem, how little they were fitted to deal
with it, my informant's comment reveals. "You doubtless remember the
story," the letter runs, "of the old lady who deplored the shooting
of craps because, though she didn't know what they were, 'life was
probably as dear to them as to anybody.'"

"It was just as it is everywhere." Busy with self and their immediate
circles, they went their daily ways unseeing, though these ways were
hedged with a corruption whose rank and horrible offshoots at every
step clutched the feet of the children for whom they were responsible.

Perhaps there is nothing to-day needed in this country more than
driving into the minds of women this personal obligation to do what
may be called intensive gardening in youth. Whether a woman wishes to
see it or not, she is the center of a whirl of life. The health, the
happiness, and the future of those that are in this whirl are affected
vitally by what she is and does. To know all of the elements which
are circulating about her as a man knows, if he does his work, the
political and business elements in his own group, this is her
essential task. That she should adjust her discoveries to the
organizations, political, educational, and religious, which are about
her, goes without saying, but these