Sometimes she is. Her education has been strong to make her so. The home atmosphere of predominant clothes and food has been about her from the cradle, and she still has clothes and food, and may elaborate them without limit. She may devote as much time to the adornment of the table as she wishes; and if her inclination take her also to the kitchen, perhaps even to the cooking school, that is more than well. She may also devote herself to the parlour and its adornment; but most naturally of all to the adornment of her own young body--all these are proper functions of the home. She may love and serve her immediate dear ones also, to any extent; that is the basic principle of it all, that is occupation enough for any girl. Yes, there is occupation enough as far as filling time goes; but how if it does not satisfy? How if the girl wants something else to do--something definite, something developing? This is deprecated by the family. "Work" is held by all to be a thing no mortal soul should do unless compelled by want. We speak sadly, tenderly, of the poor girl whose father died and left her unprovided for, wherefore "she had to work." We have not learned to see that some kind of work is necessary to all human creatures to use their powers; not mere tread-mill repetition of small, useless things, but such range of action as shall exercise all the faculties. And least of all have we learned to see that a human soul, to be healthy, must love and care for more than its own blood relations. What the girl, as a normal human being, wants is full exercise in large social relation; things to think about, feel, and do, which do not in any way concern the home. Race-babyhood may be content at home--it was first made for babies. But as we grow up into our modern human range of power, no home can or ought to content us. We need not, therefore, cease to love it, need not neglect or ignore it. We simply need something more. That is the great lack which keeps girlhood unsatisfied; the call of the human soul for its full field of action, the world. We try to meet this lack by a surfeit of supplies for lower needs. Since we first began to force upon our girl baby's astonished and resisting brain the fact that she was a girl; since we curbed her liberty by clothing and ornament calculated only to emphasise the fact of sex, and by restrictions of decorum based upon the same precocious distinction, we have never relaxed the pressure. As if we feared that there might be some mistake, that she was not really a girl but would grow up a boy if we looked the other way, we diligently strove to enforce and increase her femininity by every possible means. So by the time her womanhood does come it finds every encouragement, and the humanhood which should predominate we have restricted and forbidden. Moreover, whatever of real humanness she does manifest we persist in regarding as feminine.