"Imagine the daughters of my old friend Colonel Dinwiddie selling bibelots to any vulgarian who has the effrontery to purchase them! What can their brothers be thinking of?" he would groan. "Of course you will be careful never to enter the shop, my dears! The poor ladies shall not be embarrassed by having to wait on my wife and daughter, at least."
But aside from her father's peculiar but not unique point of view, these ventures required capital; which again put them out of the question.
She heard now and then of certain well-paid positions in connection with social service of various sorts; but these again seemed to require a special training, or a special aptitude, which Joan did not believe herself to possess. The very words "social service" had to her a chilling, impersonal, busybodyish sound, almost as ugly as "philanthropy." She was not of those to whom a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. "Charity" sounded to her Christian, and warm, and friendly; but she dreaded to offer "philanthropy," or "social service" to the unfortunate almost as much as she would have dreaded to receive such things. She decided that her metier was not good works.
Clerks in stores, she learned, do not for the most part earn a living wage. They are expected evidently to live at home, or to supplement their salary in some other fashion (just how Joan was not sure, but she entertained uneasy suspicions). By the time they become expert—heads of departments, buyers, chief milliners, etc.,—they are of course more than economically independent. But in the meanwhile....
It was the meanwhile that troubled Joan. When she broke with her family, she intended to do so with a magnificent completeness.
Only two alternatives seemed open to her inexperience; the stage and journalism. She weighed them one against the other without being able to come to a decision. Joan was rather fond of making her own decisions, and had all the impatience of her nineteen years with mature advice. But at length she consulted Stefan Nikolai.
"Please write me by return mail," (she commanded), "which you think would offer me the most advantageous career, the stage or journalism."
He obeyed on a post-card marked Christiania (his postmarks were frequently the only indication of his whereabouts):
"I should suggest the usual course in matrimony as a preliminary to any career."
Joan stamped her foot over this banality. It was something she might have expected from a man of her father's generation, but hardly from Stefan Nikolai. Particularly when he knew about Eduard, and must certainly realize that her interest in man as a sex was over!