Page:The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living (1909).djvu/270

 culture class—teaching young girls how to enter and leave a room, how to carry themselves, how to sit correctly, how to meet strangers, how to cultivate a pleasing speaking voice, how to converse on general topics. This appeals to many girls who would turn a deaf ear to the appeal of physical culture or elocution alone.

The girl from a small city or town who goes to a larger center to secure her training in physical culture and who has a year's time and the funds to spare, should study dancing or elocution also. Armed with two specialties, she can appeal to a larger proportion of the young people in her home town and its environs than if she were limited to one sort of class work. With good instructors and her own concentration on the task to be accomplished, she can return home at the end of a year entirely capable of making her own way. As I have said so often in the course of this work, success lies in the girl as much as in the amount of her training. The head of a normal training-school of physical culture has pointed out to me student-workers in their third year who were not yet capable of leading a class, yet his course is supposed to occupy only two school years. Again, when a student has met with reverses after the first year, with a few additional private lessons she has been able to leave the school and teach with success.