The girl grows up and opens her eyes upon the lights of life; she sees them as pictures on the screen, or as plays that fill her imagination with hopes and wishes, and she yearns to take up her part on the stage. Here begins her striving to enter the living, unbroken procession... The girl of today is like a bee in springtime, moving from the mouth of one flower to another, sipping the sweetest nectar and the most delicious honey; yet not one of these honeyed confections prepared in the workshops of modern refinement and in today's schools teaches her the thing she needs most of all — namely, how to become a housewife in the days to come.

Yes, she is a bride, and here she is offering her allegiance to the companion of her tomorrow. Here she leaves the world of fancy to enter reality; but her steps grow heavy, and her feet make her feel a violent pinching! For every one of the women around her presses her opinions and counsels upon her, and she believes that herein lies the complete lesson, which begins with the darning of stockings and ends with weighty matters of the soul. But this stream of guidance and counsel dries up suddenly after the wedding, to take another course upon the tongue of her mother or her mother-in-law; and since this current must run on for a period of nearly twenty years, the woman, matters standing so, must take her position with knowledge and good sense, and look into her affairs with awareness and reflection. The advisers do not notice the signs that cannot be hidden on the girl's face, nor her want of assurance on some point; they go on talking, offering their words with no care for how far their effect will carry, nor any knowledge of how wide the halo of that echo will spread. They pass from one subject to another, avoiding the most important subject of all — the one she is bound to have come upon in her