True to my word but expecting the worst, I arrived, was whisked to the seventh floor by the elevator, registered, and promptly received two shocks. First, not being charged a fee. Second, being assured that I was not an unskilled worker. Far from it. The woman at the desk named so many lines of work in which I would be received with open arms that it made me dizzy—banks, brokers, insurance, real estate, and a half-hundred more.
Then she asked which of the fields she had named especially appealed to me.
“Well,” I hesitated, forced by her eyes and her business-like manner to give some sort of an answer, “since you think I would fit in so many holes, suppose you let me try one in which I will release a man for service.”
She smiled and shook her head.
"That’s not much of a choice. In every vacancy I have named you will be releasing a man—one who has enlisted or been drafted. Under normal conditions none of these people would come to us. They’d apply to the Y. M., or some agency making a specialty of educated men. Take the T. Z. Trust Company, one of the largest banking institutions in the country. If you go there you’ll be the first woman; heretofore they have employed men exclusively.
“But what could I do in a bank? I’ve never been beyond the drawing and deposit windows. That could not be called bank training.”
“Bank employees are not produced by training but by experience. Suppose you go down and let them judge of your fitness. Besides bookkeepers and stenographers they have openings for intelligent, educated women. I’ll give you a card.”
And give me a card she did. Within an hour after entering the employment rooms, without having spent a cent, I was on my way to see the treasurer of one of the largest banking institutions in the Wall Street district. Mr. Morton, the treasurer, being in the loan department, I was given a chair beside his desk, and asked to wait.
“I dreamed I dwelt in marble halls,” I hummed to myself.
If I should be employed here I would certainly work in marble halls. The bank, as far as I could see on that floor, was beautiful marble and bronze. Wonderful! The huge flat-top desk beside me and the chair in which I sat were both exquisitely grained mahogany. And there were five other desks and numerous chairs just like them on the officers’ floor—at the front of the bank and raised one step above the general floor level.