CONVERSATION-PIECE
The girl is fifteen, and pretty, although you are not conscious of that at first. She has a good figure, but her legs are overdeveloped; her hair is light and would be wavy, if it were cared for, instead of being weathered and scraped into two heavy braids; the lines which fall heavily from the nostrils to the corners of her mouth — the stress-lines of the athlete — obscure the expression of her face, so that, as she speaks, her essential prettiness must fight its way through these marks of strain and neglect Besides, she wears the white blouse and dark-blue skirt and black stockings which are the uniform of the B.D.M., and not a very becoming one.
The foreigner is talking to her; he is young, too, and easily discouraged by her impersonal tone, her military voice, and the bitter cracks she makes when she accepts the cigarette he offers. “German women don’t smoke!” She bites the words off, and thrusts her face forward at the match he holds for her.
He is a little at a loss for conversation. “What would you like to be?” he asks, looking down at her bent head.
“A mother,” she snaps, and the inflection jangles. She straightens up, and lets the smoke go, slowly; this first cigarette tastes good. “No, but really,” she goes on, “there isn’t very much I can become. Good jobs exist for men only, and you know where woman’s place is. Or, if she isn’t in the home, but in a job, you can be sure it isn’t a good job!”
“But your father’s a professor,” the young man says, in relief, for at any rate she is talking now — “don’t you want to go to college?”
“That’s way out,” she answers, “with great difficulties before you can get in, and hardly a chance of getting anywhere afterward.”
“Or medical school — you could be a doctor, couldn’t you?”
“Well, they’ve banned women assistants in the State hospitals now, and that’s where you’d go after medical school. Anyway, 90 per cent of the medical set-up belongs to the State, and you’re officially banned if you’re married — and unofficially, if you’re not.”
“But there’s always teaching, isn’t there?” he suggests.