The Girl and Her Religion

ften finds her a girl of talent and natural ability. She is the very opposite of the indifferent girl for she responds to everything. The girl she will finally become depends

e of friends that parents and

ught her. It troubled her conscience and she cried on the way home from school, but her companions laughed at her, told her she was "all right," and had stood by them splendidly. They made her feel heroic and she dried her eyes and stifled her desire to tell her mother. Before the year was over the child had entirely changed. Her studies suffered, she seemed to lose her ambition, her naturalness and spontaneity vanished. Her mother began to discover increasing untruthfulness. One day, toward the close of the school year, the child asked to wear her best dress to school, saying there was to be an entertainment. There was no entertainment. Instead there was a party at the home of one of the girls of whom her mother disapproved. The party began later than they had planned and it was nearly six before the child reached home. She found her mot

r natural tendencies toward good are wholly transformed by association with evil companions whose

companions of a girl of vacillating, easy-going, v

pictures of every sort, had entered into the mischief of "the crowd" always close to the leader. In a pathetic letter to one of her chums she said that at the very first opportunity she should run away and be with them all again. She characterized the beautiful suburb with its neatly kept lawns and pretty homes as "a dead old hole" from which she could not wait to escape. Still, her aunt's home, the new wardrobe containing the lovely dresses, becoming hats and coats, for which she had always longed, tempted her to remain. One day, early in October, her class

coarse slang, loud talking and shouting of her companions, who in the city had been termed "wild" and adopted the ways of the new leader. At the end of two years it would

environment, the chances are that the good friend, Habit, will have determined the way that she shall go. If she should now drop back into the old street, the old companions

eans everything. To discover such girls, to open the way for the working of new friendships, which s

e can work effectually only through the individual effort plus the law. It must be made "to go hard" with those who, for selfish

ce is made for the tendency to lay the blame upon other shoulders, the facts bear out the testimony that there has been a leader. The girls who by nature are weak of will, and have had no training which could tend to strengthen or develop that will, must be protected, and that protection must be furnished by the community. It may be furnished by putting the welfare teacher into the school; by making the str

easily led were taken when the carefully supervised public playground and the schoo

hose interested in great city problems have yet dreamed. The day will come when these women will make the arm of the law an efficient

netist, two or three violins followed, then a banjo and guitar. The service that day was to be a great event, for the wonderful woman in charge of that school who had done away with the cells, taken down the great spiked iron fence and planted flowers in its stead

elf-consciousness because of their new glory raiment, they took their seats. Who could fail to forgive them if they fingered lovingly the great soft silk Peter Thompson ties and patted the bows on their hair. Some of them seemed scarcely more than children though some were in their late

new comers must sleep, then the smaller rooms with six and four beds, the still smaller with two and the honor rooms which a

alk the girls had laid, that we were leaving a boarding school where

hat these girls could ever have been guilty of the deeds the records show!" she answered, "These girls are not vicious. It is after all a question of leadership and they follo