but a few years from now you will understand and be grateful.”

The daughter’s answer came quickly: “That is what you always say, but I know I’m missing all the pleasures the other girls have.”

The mother was discouraged. “I don’t know what to do with Mildred,” she said, after her daughter had gone, “she seems to have lost all confidence in us.”

“No,” I said, “she hasn’t. She has supreme confidence in herself. If you had frankly told her your reason for refusing her request, or simply said that it was not the proper thing, since you could not furnish her with a chaperon, it might have helped. But if you treat her as patiently for the next few years as you have done to-night, she will come out all right.”

I am sure she will. The rapid development of her mental life is showing through her will. The years are coming when she will need to choose for herself. The power to choose is being developed now. Inexperience leads her to make unwise choices, and so the experience of older and wiser people must guide her, and if necessary decide for her. But wherever it is possible for her to choose for herself, whenever the issue at stake is not too great, the wise parent and teacher will allow her to choose, yes, even require her to do so, that the power of choice may be developed and the mental forces strengthened. And when she has chosen they will help her carry out her choice, that she may see the result and judge of its wisdom, thus helping her in the struggle to develop both will and judgment.

The time when parents attempted to break the will is passing. The wise parent and teacher of the girl in her teens knows that she needs, if her future is to be useful and happy, not a broken will but a trained will. Training is a slow and steady process and requires unlimited patience.

The aim of every one in any way responsible for the education of the girl in her teens is to help her to see the right and desire it. If that can be done for her, she has at least been started on the road that leads to safety. This is the time when those who teach her may help her to see the value of promptness, absolute accuracy, and dependableness. When she promises to do a thing it is the duty of all who teach her to help her keep that promise. But she must always see the value of the thing taught. The mind must be satisfied; she must know why. The girl in her teens is developing the individual moral sense, and if the years are to bring strength of character every open avenue to the mind must be used to help in constantly raising standards and impressing truth.

The awakening of the girl in her teens to new phases of mental activity reveals itself in her passion for reading. It is true that some girls before twelve read eagerly all sorts of books, but most girls develop a genuine love for reading with adolescence. They then become omnivorous readers. When one looks over lists of “Books I Have Read” prepared by high-school girls he is astonished by the number and variety.

It is most interesting to note the books designated in personal conversation as “the dearest story,” “just great,” “dandy,” “perfectly fine,” “elegant,” “beautiful,” and “the best book I have ever read.” That these books have a tremendous influence on the mental life in forming a “taste” for literature, and furnishing motives for action, ideals, and information, no one can doubt.

Who helps these girls to satisfy their hunger for a “good book to read?” Many have no help,—they read what they will. Sometimes the parent acts as guide, often the book lists gotten out by the city librarian, or graded lists of books prepared by teachers in the public school, although many times at just the period when most reading is being done the “lists” disappear from the schoolroom. Seldom does the Sunday-school teacher guide her girls in their choice of books, yet this is one of the most valuable and helpful things a woman can do for a girl.

One often wishes there were more books of the right sort for the girl in her teens. With the exception of the old standards that remain helpful to succeeding generations there are comparatively few books for girls that are interesting, fascinating, wholesome, and free from those “problems” on which few women and no girls can dwell with profit. Modern writers have given us a few fine, inspiring stories for girls, and the teacher who seeks them out, reads them, and then passes them on to her girls is helping in a real and definite way to deepen and broaden character. All teachers of girls are hoping that, now so many good books for boys have been written, our writers will turn their attention to girls and their needs.

Girls in their teens need biography and enjoy it. They need to know fine women who have actually lived. If the lives of such women could be written for girls they would find eager readers. The author of the life of Alice Freeman Palmer has presented an inspiring and helpful gift to the girls of all time, and its influence can never be estimated. We need more such books.

No one of us would return for a moment to the stories of heroines so good that in the last chapter they died and went to heaven, but we do need books in which girls and women are sane, reasonable, and good, yet live, and enjoy living to the full. The world is full of wholesome, true, womanly women, and our girls need to know about them in fact and fiction.

The mental activity of the girl in her teens reveals itself also in her great desire to know. During the period of her teens the girl so often appears superior to the boy mentally. Sometimes she is, but more often the seeming superiority can be explained in two ways: the hunger for knowledge and longing to understand life come to her earlier than to the boy; she desires to excel, and feels more keenly the disgrace of low rank and unsatisfactory progress in her studies, which leads her to devote more time and conscientious effort to master them. While her brother is buried deep in athletics, she is buried in dreams, romances and facts. She wants things explained. After sixteen, there dawns the period when she demands that her teacher shall know. She must have knowledge. Some teachers of girls in the later teens hold their interest through a charming personality, a knowledge of the heart of a girl, and a clever presentation of lessons. Still, such teachers are unable oftentimes to help the girl in her struggle to straighten out tangles of what she calls “faith” and “knowledge.”

She asks with a new earnestness, “Are the miracles true?” “Is the Bible different from other books?” Only last week a girl of eighteen, suffering with her dearest friend, whose brother had been sentenced to a term in prison for gross intoxication, said to me: “That man prays often when he is sober to be kept from drinking, how can God let him do it when it is just killing his mother and all the family? I don’t see how it can be true that God loves men when he lets them be so wicked, and when people suffer so, and starve and die in wrecks and fires and—it’s terrible. I know you will think I’m awful, but sometimes I don’t believe in God at all.” Her voice trembled, and I knew the hurried sentences represented months of thinking. I did not consider her “awful.” God help her—she has looked the old, old problem of evil squarely in the face for the first time, and is staggered by it. How to help her in this crisis we shall consider in our discussion of the “Spiritual Side.”

She needs now more than ever a teacher who can understand her, who has thought things out for herself, who can teach positively, who is too near