But these means of livelihood were mere makeshifts. Ambitious, imperious, and able, it was not in her to work for others for any great length of time. As soon as she felt that she "knew the ropes" in New York she told certain friends she had made that she wished to go into the play brokerage business for herself. As she inspires confidence—this is one of her assets—her friends staked her, and she opened her office with the intention of promoting American plays only. Her trained mind rapidly adapted itself to business and in the course of a few years she was handling the plays of many of the leading dramatists for a proportionate number of leading producers. When the war broke out, so successful was she that she had a house of her own in the East Thirties, furnished with the beautiful things she had collected during her yearly visits to Europe—for long since she had opened offices in Paris and London, her business outgrowing its first local standard.
The war hit her very hard. She had but recently left the hospital after a severe operation, which had followed several years of precarious health. She was quite a year reestablishing her former strength and full capacity for work. One of the most exuberantly vital persons I had ever met, she looked as frail as a reed during that first terrible year of the war, but now seems to have recovered her former energies.
There was more than the common results of an operation to exasperate her nerves and keep her vitality at a low ebb. Some thirty of her male relatives were at the Front, and the whole world of the theater was smitten with a series of disastrous blows. Sixteen plays on the road failed in one day, expensive plays ran a week in New York. Managers went into bankruptcy. It was a time of strain and uncertainty and depression, and nobody suffered more than the play brokers. Miss Kauser as soon as the war broke out rented her house and went into rooms that she might send to Hungary all the money she could make over expenses, and for a year this money was increasingly difficult to collect, or even to make. But if she despaired no one heard of it. She hung on. By and by the financial tide turned for the country at large and she was one of the first to ride on the crest. Her business is now greater than ever, and her interest in life as keen.
III
BELLE DA COSTA GREENE
This "live wire," one of the outstanding personalities in New York, despite her youth, is the antithesis of the two previous examples of successful women in business, inasmuch as no judge on the bench nor surgeon at the Front ever had a severer training for his profession than she. People who meet for the first time the young tutelar genius of Mr. Morgan's Library, take for granted that any girl so fond of society, so fashionable in dress and appointments, and with such a comet's tail of admirers, must owe her position with its large salary to "pull," and that it is probably a sinecure anyway.
Little they know.
Belle Greene, who arrests even the casual if astute observer with her overflowing joie de vivre and impresses him as having the best of times in this best of all possible worlds, is perhaps the "keenest on her job" of any girl in the city of New York. Let any of these superficial admirers attempt to obtain entrance, if he can, to the Library, during the long hours of work, and with the natural masculine intention of clinching the favorable impression he made on the young lady the evening before, and he will depart in haste, moved to a higher admiration or cursing the well-known caprice of woman, according to his own equipment.
For Miss Greene's determination to be one of the great librarians of the world took form within her precocious brain at the age of thirteen and it has never fluctuated since. Special studies during both school and recreation hours were pursued to the end in view: Latin, Greek, French, German, history—the rise and spread of civilization in particular, and as demonstrated by the Arts, Sciences, and Literature of the world. When she had absorbed all the schools could give her, she took an apprenticeship in the Public Library system in order thoroughly to ground herself in the clerical and routine phases of the work.
She took a special course in bibliography at the Amherst Summer Library School, and then entered the Princeton University Library on nominal pay at the foot of the ladder, and worked up through every department in order to perfect herself for the position of University Librarian.