“What kind of shop were you contemplating?”
“Something quite different from any shop Dorfield now boasts. But you tell me what this Elizabeth was thinking of so she can get the credit if she deserves it. We may have had the same plans in mind. Ideas seem to be in the air like flocks of birds and the same ones or ones of the same family light on several persons at the same time.”
“Elizabeth wants a literary work-shop, where one could get manuscript typed and corrected. She thought she might combine a clipping bureau with it and even write articles for persons who had not the brains to do their own work. She says she could do obituaries and valedictories and club papers for aspiring females, also speeches for politicians. Elizabeth is very clever but comes of the stuffiest, most conservative family. The mother is one of those women who are work crazy but never want their daughters to raise their hands and the father is living about fifty years too late. Mrs. Wright would have been a wonder if she had had the outlook to go into business instead of wasting all her energies on cleaning and cooking and getting husbands for her daughters. Elizabeth is dead tired of being what she calls ‘an unproductive consumer.’ The taste she had of being at work and drawing a salary during the war has ruined her as far as taking her place in the family of daughters, all of them striving towards the matrimonial goal. Elizabeth is determined to break the bonds.”
“Bully for Elizabeth! She sounds fine to me. I like the idea of the literary work-shop and clipping bureau. Does she know short-hand as well as typewriting?”
“I believe she knows it but has no speed, having just picked it up by herself.”
“Better and better! She is the kind that picks things up by herself. When can I see my partner?”
“She will come to see you this morning. Elizabeth always wants to get what she is interested in going immediately. She is like her mother in some ways but a much more comfortable person to be with.”
They found Elizabeth Wright awaiting them when they arrived at Colonel Hathaway’s residence.
“Please excuse me if I have come too soon, but I couldn’t wait,” she cried as she came forward to embrace Mary Louise and shake hands with her future partner.
“You couldn’t come too soon for me, but Josie may be tired after her long trip,” suggested Mary Louise.