“I know everything about it,” Helen boasted mockingly. “I even admit the necessity for keeping my clothes pretty well pressed and clean. I may scoff with the rest of you at Mrs. Brownley’s methods of organizing a Junior Republican Club but I know that she’s the finest realist of us all. She is willing to admit that women love white elephant badges, and appeals to them as the virtuous sex, and fashionable Junior Republican Clubs, which are Junior Leagues in action. I can see myself developing a philosophy just like Mrs. Brownley and learning to speak of democracy and the home with her impressiveness and Mrs. Thorstad’s italics and bending my energies to making the Republican party sought after by women because after all it includes all the best people.”
“You’re a great woman. I think I’ll write a book about you.”
She looked at him out of the corner of her eyes. “You’ll never write a book about anything, Jerrold. You’re too dilettante to ever get started. I know. I was the same way until Margaret hurled me into all this action. Now I am, as you say, spoiled for a good dilettante. I’m spoiled for a lot of things, in fact. For being an easy going comfortable wife. I’m a poor wreck of a woman politician.” She laughed at him and looked so mockingly pretty under the big gray chiffon hat she wore that Jerrold’s eyes were lit with enthusiasm. Jerrold had motored Helen down to the Brownleys’ summer home for a conference with Mrs. Brownley, who had the Junior Republican Club on her hands at the moment and wanted to talk it over with Helen. Mrs. Brownley had done a great deal of organizing and much of it was extremely effective along the lines suggested by Margaret and Mrs. Thorstad. But Mrs. Brownley knew that the lure of the social column was great and she had pressed Bob and Allie into action. The Junior Republican Club, composed of girls just preparing for the vote, was to be one of the educational features of the campaign. They would be useful, she pointed out, in helping when the Republican women had headquarters, later—and useful or not they ought to be interested.
So the Junior Republican Club was formed amid much enthusiasm on the piazza of the Redding Hotel at Lake Nokomis where St. Pierre sent its fashionable colony during the summer months. They had a president, and several news agencies had already taken pictures of them “reading from left to right and from right to left—standing in the back row, etc.” One of the agencies had been acting for a New York paper and the girls were somewhat stirred over the novelty. As Allie said, “It was time some one did something. Look what happened to Russia where the Bolsheviks drove you out of your homes and took everything you’d got. If they’d been organized it might have been different.” Besides her father said he thought women, especially educated women, (Allie spoke with personal feeling, having spent four thousand a year at the Elm Grove School) were to be the salvation of the country.
She had plenty of support and enthusiasm. Even in these spoiled and under nourished little minds a tiny flame of enthusiasm for the new possibilities of women’s lives were burning. They interpreted the new freedom to suit themselves as did most other women. To them it meant a good deal of license, a cool impudence and camaraderie towards men, a definite claiming of all the rights of men in so far as they contributed to the fun of existence. “Women aren’t as they used to be” was a handy peg for them to hang escapades upon, a blanket reason for refusing to accept any discipline. That was the substance of their feminism.
As for their politics they were hewed from the politics of their fathers and their class. They were defensive for the most part. They had heard of the exigent demands of labor, they had seen their fathers irritant under “Bolshevik legislation”—in their own shrewd minds (and many of them had the shrewdness common to smallness) they knew that all their luxury and their personal license, their expensive clothes and schools and motors and unlimited charge accounts were based on an order whose right to exist was being challenged. They roused to its defense, boisterously, giggling, and yet class conscious.
Helen did what she could to palliate any trouble the club might cause.
She pressed on Mrs. Brownley the need of not antagonizing possible and prospective members of the party by anything that appeared as snobbishness. Mrs. Brownley agreed astutely, starting post haste on a scheme for organizing the stenographers of the city and mapping out a scheme whereby the employees of the large department stores might be drawn into Republican groups. She urged Helen to talk to the Junior Republicans and Helen did it.
She noted Barbara among the rest, handsome in yellow linen and yet looking tired and worn. The artificial penciling under her eyes was circled by deeper yellow brown hollows, and her restlessness and lack of interest in the whole proceeding were conspicuous.
“What a world weary face that child has!” thought Helen.