Some mistaken ideas about leisure have grown up, making it difficult to say anything on this subject without being misunderstood.  Stories—­whole books of them—­about “spreads” and more or less lawless escapades in school and college, have given girls and other people, too, the impression that this is the sort of thing school leisure is.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  Midnight feasts may occur in school, and most of us, unless we are too good to be average girls, have taken part in them.  But such stories are vicious, for they misrepresent the life by suggesting that eating inferior and unwholesome food is the real freedom most girls desire.  There is something repulsive in the very thought.  Feasts that leave a girl with a coated tongue and a dull head and Monday “blues” do not fairly represent school or college leisure.  Good times that interfere with good work have no place in ideally free hours.  But, indeed, the odours from the chafing-dishes do suggest that some of the girls are trying to put into literal execution the wish of a great German professor in Oxford.  The professor, eager to try a dish he saw on the hotel bill of fare, but with his English and German verbs not quite disentangled, said to the waiter, “Hereafter I vish to become a Velsh Rabbit.”  Perhaps becoming a Welsh rarebit represents the height of some girls’ ideals, but this is hard to believe.

The possession of leisure depends to a great extent upon the will power.  The girl who has never learned to say “No,” who has no power of selection, cannot expect to have any hours for her own use.  She is quarry for every idle suggestion, every social engagement, every executive “job” which pursues her.  The girl who engages all her time socially cannot have a sense of leisure, for she turns her playtime into but another schedule, to be met as inexorably as her academic courses.  Her days become a formidable array of “dates,” often stretching ahead for weeks.  Even if girls are not determined to have it for themselves, they should give to others some opportunity for freedom, and should respect their possible desire for solitude.  The girl who engages or annexes every particle of time, her own or that of some one else with whom she comes in contact, is making leisure an impossibility.  The girl who leaves no margin cannot hope for even the spirit of freedom.

Many students excuse themselves for much executive work in school and college on the ground that it is done in their leisure.  That girl is a goose who allows herself through any sense of self-importance, or irreplaceable usefulness, to be so involved in executive work that all other aspects of her school life are slighted.  If she refuses to be swamped by such “jobs” she can have the happiness of reflecting that probably some girls who need the training far more than she does are doing the work.  To every girl will come the opportunity right along for “managing”; club and social work will bring it, and a good-sized family will bring it as nothing else can.  But school leisure she will not have again.  The whole aim of the school is to enrich the lives of its students, and it knows all too well that that student who does not keep for herself the leisure upon which body and mind and soul must feed is indeed poor.