mind is the habit of projecting a task against the background of human experience as that experience has been revealed in history and literature, and of throwing into details the enthusiasm born of this larger vision.  She is fortunate who comes to the task of making a home with this habit already formed.  Her student life may have cast no shadow of the future.  When she was reading AEschylus or Berkeley, or writing reports on the Italian despots, or counting the segments of a beetle’s antennae, she may not have foreseen the hours when the manner of life and the manner of death of human beings would depend upon her.  She was merely sanely absorbed in the tasks of her present.  But in later life she comes to see that in performing them, she learned to disentangle the momentary from the permanent, to prefer courage to cowardice, to pay the price of hard work for values received.  Age may bring what youth withholds, a sense of humor, a mellow sympathy.  But only youth can begin that habitual discipline of mind and will which is the root, if not of all success, at least of that which blooms in the comfort of other people.  Carry the logic of the vocation-mongers to its extreme.  Grant that every girl in college ought someday to marry, and that we must train her, while we have her, for this profession.  Then let the college insist on honest work, clear thinking and bright imagination in those great fields in which successive generations reap their intellectual harvest.  Captain Rostron of the Carpathia once spoke to a body of college students who were on fire with enthusiasm for the rescuer of the Titanic’s survivors.  He ended with some such words as these:  “Go back to your classes and work hard.  I scarcely knew that night what orders were coming out when I opened my mouth to speak, but I can tell you that I had been preparing to give those orders ever since I was a boy in school.”  Many a home may be saved from shipwreck in the future because today girls are doing their duty in their Greek class rooms and Physics laboratories.

But this fallacy of domesticity probes deeper than we have yet indicated.  It is, in the last analysis, superficial to ticket ourselves off as house-keepers or even as women.  What are these unplumbed wastes between housekeepers and teachers, mothers and scholars, civil engineers and professors of Greek, senators and journalists, bankers and poets, men and women?  A philosopher has pointed out that what we share is vastly greater than what separates us.  We walk upon and must know the same earth.  We live under the same sun and stars.  In our bodies we are subject to the same laws of physics, biology and chemistry.  We speak the same language, and must shape it to our use.  We are products of the same past, and must understand it in order to understand the present.  We are vexed by the same questions about Good and Evil, Will and Destiny.  We all bury our dead.  We shall all die ourselves.  Back of our vocations lies human life.  Back of the streams in which we dabble is that immortal sea which brought us hither.  To sport upon its shore and hear the roll of its mighty waters is the divine privilege of youth.