The efficient Country Girl of to-day is often as equal to the management of the intractable horse as a man: she rides the disc-plough and she runs the automobile. It would only be in some backward section of the country or in some tradition-bound family, where the daughter could not drive the horses and have the use of a conveyance to go to town whenever it seemed to her to be necessary. It has been suggested by an eminent authority that the farm woman should go to town once a week and should also go to a neighbor's every week for an afternoon's visit. What then should be the excursions of the daughter during the years when she is growing up and becoming a young lady, entering upon her duties as hostess and social leader? There should not a day pass when she does not have some contact with the social world of the rural community. She should have a large letter-writing correspondence and make it yield her all the culture possible. She should take part in every commendable social organization that is accessible and with her mother's cooperation make her home a center of gracious social welcome to friends and neighbors. With the new machinery there will be much greater simplification possible in the household, and in the wake of this may enter our old-time friend, Hospitality, so long and sadly missed from our ferny lanes.
Perhaps it is not necessary to suggest that the greatest care should be taken to place under the safest conditions the social life in which the daughter bears a part. In order that this may be so there is no better safeguard than that the mother should be in closest confidence with the daughter, should be present at all the parties, should be in all the fun. This is the scheme now most approved under the best social auspices and is adopted in the country wherever they live up to the most refined models. It means that the mother must never lose the thread of her daughter's confidence; and if she has done so by the mistake of some past day, she must leave no stone unturned, by tact and love and prayer, to regain the lost ground. It means joining in all the games; it means taking an interest in all the youthful plans. It means adapting her mind to the youthful mind. It means—but why should I tell mothers what that means? They know. And the daughters must do their part too in keeping the confidence-thread between themselves and their mother always perfect and golden.
When a community is really dead, we may know the fact by the absence of sociability. The whole country problem hinges chiefly upon this social matter; and as the woman is the essential upholder of the community the world over in social affairs, it behooves the young woman in rural life to prepare for these responsibilities if she will ward off from the farm and village community a deadly and intolerable inaction.
After all Cousin Artemisia was not in such a parlous state. If those eager eyes had had no expression in them at all, if the curiosity in them had long since faded into indifference and a dull unresponsive look had taken its place, then a just observer might well have had cause for compassion for that young woman into whose soul the iron of isolation had gone so deeply that it had hardened and deadened the best part of her. If a life has been lived through with all its experiences and has been one long record of unsatisfied longing for the impossible, and if the end came without ever one break in the cloud that hid away an imagined world of fulfilment and success, and if during it all there had been never an instant's let-up from the momently waiting for the sun to break through, such a life as that has been a success. Not to attain is not failure. The only failure is to cease trying, to stop aspiring, and to let the dream and the vision fade away from the face of the unresponding clouds.
Some one may say, Why then touch her in this obliviousness of her unfilled possibilities? The same fallacy lies beneath all missionary work, all philanthropy, all striving upward. We wish every Country Girl in the remotest stronghold of conservatism to be touched with that divine discontent that will stir her to an upward struggle.
Among the six million Country Girls for whom this book is written, there are many who are tremendously and honorably efficient; there are also many who are by no means awake to their duty and opportunity; but the vision will soon touch the eyes of all, and will reveal to them the part they may play in the new Country Life era.
Not for her own sake alone does any girl strive. All she does lifts everywhere as well as in her own valley. And these beneficent influences will reach out and include other and still other circles of girls who repose under the protection of the republic. Among these one may see the puzzled eyes of Porto Ricans, and of Aleutian and of Philippine girls. And there are found two larger companies: the dark-skinned girls with the tragic remembrance of slavery in their eyes, and the aquiline faces of the Appalachian mountain girls, dignified and quietly expectant and our close racial kin. Among these adoptive and neglected fields there will be hollows of stagnation and delays of progress. For the reclamation of these we are not by any means doing what we might as a people; they some way escape the great abundantly filled currents of philanthropy; and if they soon become discontented and ominous, we shall have ourselves to blame. It would be better to be beforehand with nature's demands and arouse noble aspirations that may forestall wrong tendencies.