ABSTRACT
While convalescing from typhoid fever and foot surgery, Sylvia Trevor, a talented musician, hobbles to the piano and sings Christmas hymns in a weak little voice that ‘wavered suspiciously toward the close’, because she misses her father (p. 130). After her father’s death, Sylvia muses what she could do ‘that a thousand other girls could not accomplish equally well?’ She could play a little, sing a little, paint a little and trim a hat, but she could not boil a potato. ‘She possessed, in fact, a smattering of many things, but had not really mastered one.’ (p. 379) Sylvia is the author’s mouthpiece for a lesson in making it in the world: Girls should learn to do one thing well and measure their progress not by amateur standards but rather by professional ones.
