WORTH YOUR WEIGHT IN GOLD 193

meanly generous, incompetently competent, or even wick-
edly pious. If you will think a moment, you will see that
it must be so.

For instance, a gift that really is of help to one needing
it may be given in the spirit of display or of rivalry with
some other giver. This is not true generosity. A merely
surface quality, however effective to outsiders, cannot be
the same as a quality which is so true, so deep and genu-
ine, so in the grain from use and steady growth, that it
has become a part of one’s own soul.

Doubtless circumstances make the paths of improve-
ment easy for some and difficult for others — but a life
that is easy at the start is not necessarily a fortunate life.
Hindering things sometimes are the stepping-stones to
prosperity and peace. I know to-day noble women whose
lives are the fitting flower of a beautiful, happy, indus-
trious girlhood — women who did not spend their early,
most impressive years solely for enjoyment’s sake, with a
vague sense of something far ahead, called life, which had
very little to do with their present plans and pleasures —
even with their studies and occupations.

Some persons, if once started on a road, will be so confi-
dent of their way that they Il forget to make the proper
turnings; and there are persons who, in their tremendous
efforts for usefulness or self-improvement, make all around
them uneasy and uncomfortable. That is over-zeal. Such
persons are not worth their weight in gold to anybody. Then
we have the self-satisfied kind, the worst of all, perhaps.
Self-satisfaction is a wall that, builded by a girl’s own
vanity, shuts her in completely. She cannot get outside of

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