In her main contention that if she is to keep up with the fashions she need not buy clothing that will last more than one season, she is probably right. It is natural also that this method of buying should be distressing to her mother, who has been accustomed to clothes of unchanging fashions which were judged entirely by their quality. When to her normal distress at buying goods of poor quality at any price there is added an outrage to her native thrift, because the price of these tawdry fashionable goods is actually greater than for goods of better quality, it is not surprising that she and her daughter should clash on the question of what to buy. The question of shoes is said to be a special point of conflict. The girls insist on costly high-heeled, light-colored boots, while the mother sees that she could buy at less than half the price better shoes, more sensible, and of better quality. The conflict is more acute in proportion as the mother has lived an isolated life in this country and has not herself tried to keep up with American fashions. It is interesting to note that workers in the Vocational Guidance Bureau in Chicago state that this desire of the girls for expensive clothes is a leading motive in causing them to leave school to go to work. RELATIONS OF BOYS AND GIRLS The most serious of the problems in connection with the older boy and girl is that of the relations between the sexes. In the old country the situation was much more easily defined. The conventions were fixed, and had changed very little since the mother was young. In Italy, for example, daughters never went out with young men, not even after they were engaged. The same is said to be true in most of the other countries from which our immigrants have come. In Croatia, Serbia, and Bohemia it is unheard of for a young woman to go out alone with a young man. Moreover, coming as so many of these people do from small villages or rural communities, they have been used to a single-group life which is impossible in a city. As one Italian woman has expressed it, work and recreation went hand in hand in the old country. During the day there was the work of both men and women in the fields in congenial groups, and in the evenings songs and dancing in the village streets. The whole family worked and played together with other family groups.