The Girl and Her Religion | Page 3

what she wanted and was impatient in voice and manner as she explained to the girl on the other side of the counter what she had hoped to find. She was extravagantly gowned in a fashion not at all in good taste for morning shopping, but she was pretty and her fair complexion, her shining hair, soft and well cared for, the beautiful fur thrown back over her shoulders fascinated the other girl and filled her heart with envy. She was pale and anemic, her hair was dark and there was barely enough of it to "do up" even when helped out by the puffs she had bought from the counter on the opposite side. The weather had been bitterly cold and she was suffering from sore throat and headache. She had turned up the collar of her thin coat but it had failed to protect her and she was thinking of that as she looked at the fur. She was worn out by the strain of the Christmas season, had slept late, and then rushed to the store with only a cup of coffee to help her do the work of the morning. She did not care much whether the girl before her found the toys she wanted or not. Toys seemed such a small part of life and Christmas aroused in her all sorts of conflicting emotions. It was winter and life looked very hard, as it can look to a girl of fourteen upon whom poverty had laid a heavy hand and whose life has been robbed by the sins and misfortunes of others, who has been handicapped from the beginning.
The girl before the counter finally decided upon the toys, ordered them sent to her home and looking scornfully at the cheap jewelry and tawdry ornaments passed out of the store. She was thinking what a nuisance cousins were, how ridiculous it was in her father to insist each year upon her remembering his poor relations at Christmas, just when she needed all her allowance for herself, and planning to tell him that next year she did not intend to do it. She was in a most unhappy mood because she had been denied permission to attend a house-party and she could not bear to be denied anything. She was handicapped by the heavy hand of money, newly acquired by her father and by the atmosphere of pride, vanity and social ambition which surrounded her.
All day through the busy streets of the shopping district they passed--the city's handicapped girls. Some were held back from the best that life can give by poverty, which like a great yawning chasm lies between the girl and all her natural desires and ambitions, some held back from the joy of simple, natural living by the forced, artificial social system of which they are a part, some pitiful specimens of physical and mental handicap and some who showed the strain of the handicap of sin, mingled in that Christmas crowd.
Through the open door of great sea-port cities there have poured during the years past steady streams of handicapped girls. They are poor, they are plunged into a life whose manners and customs they cannot grasp, they are handicapped by a language they do not understand and by great expectations seldom destined to be fulfilled.
According to our government statistics during nineteen hundred twelve, ninety three thousand, two hundred sixty-one (93,261) girls from fifteen to twenty-one years of age came to us from across the sea and in three years an army of two hundred forty-six thousand, five hundred fifty-four (246,554) became a part of the girl problem our country must meet. It is hard to picture in concrete fashion how great this host of girlhood is. Sometimes when one looks into the faces of a thousand college girls at Wellesley, Vassar, or Smith and realizes that in a single year more than ninety three times as many girls from fifteen to twenty-one came to test the opportunities of a new land, the significance of the figure becomes a little more clear to him. When he realizes that in three years enough young girls land in this country to found a city the size of Rochester or St. Paul, when he tries to imagine this army of girls marching six abreast through city streets for hours and hours until the thousands upon thousands, representing scores of tongues and nations, have passed, some conception of the great task facing any organization attempting to direct that army of unprepared, unequipped and largely unprotected girlhood comes to him.
[Illustration: UNCONSCIOUS OF HER HANDICAPS SHE ANTICIPATES KEENLY LIFE IN THE NEW WORLD]
Where will they be in another year--those ninety-three thousand and more who came to us in nineteen hundred twelve? What an array of factories and kitchens, what rows