Evening Round-Up / More Good Stuff Like Pep

by William Crosbie Hunter

Be a Know Girl, Not a Show Girl

Girl, what a wonderful creature you can be. What a glorious success you can make of your life, if you get the right start, the right hands to help you, the right hearts to love you, and the right eyes to watch you, the right thoughts to make you, and the right ideals to guide you.

There are so many influences to spoil you, so much convention, so much artificiality, so much snobbery, so much caste, so much foolish frivolity.

Then there are the wrong examples, the wrong grooming, the wrong environments, the wrong influences surrounding you, that it is not to be wondered why so many girls lose their heads and make a fizzle of their young lives.

The fizzle is generally because daddy and mamma have a lot of foolish notions about bringing up the girls. Especially is this so if the parents are wealthy.

Here is the history of many a rich girl. She is born without welcome, fed on a bottle, reared by a nurse, grows up in a nursery, estranged from her mother, later on sent away to school, mixes with a lot of other rich girls, gets lots of foolish notions, false estimates, and prejudiced views. She graduates and comes home and there are a lot of "doings" which she attends, then comes the show-off which is called a debut.

She is shown off like a filly at the horse show, and some high-collared young man wins her head although she thinks it's her heart. She thinks it's the thing to marry, and he is such "a swell fellow," he is such "good company," and he "dances so well,"—these qualities win her head.

So the girl marries, has children, husband goes broke and the girl awakens to the necessity of coming down from her pedestal, facing stern necessity, and raising her children as her mother should have raised her.

That's the picture of the poor rich girl whose parents are to blame for the nonsense she got in her head.

But, you, Girl, you are going to learn your cooking on a gas range instead of a chafing dish; you'll learn to bake bread before fudge; you'll learn how to cook solids before you learn to make salads.