In our public schools girls are, on the whole, the best mathematicians. They know the difference between principal and interest in the arithmetic-book, and can rattle off the problem on the blackboard very quickly. What they need is, whether they are supporting themselves or not, to be encouraged to keep their own accounts, and for that purpose to have a definite allowance, and to have, if possible, a little money property of their own, in order to acquire the habit of looking after it. The busiest father or husband has time enough to answer a few plain questions, and there are little manuals of business that make the essentials much simpler things than a mayonnaise-dressing or a new chain-stitch. I will not say for girls what a respectable livery-stable keeper once said to me about boys — that the first thing is to teach them the value of a dollar. “That's what I call the corner-stone,” he added; but when one sees from the high table-land of middle life the wrecks of households made by the ignorance and over-confidence of women, one cannot help wishing that the little property they usually possess might be less exclusively a “trust fund.”
