“All this time the handsome junior partners and so on for whom we keep business house and through propinquity are supposed to love––they have fallen in love with sheltered girls such as your own self, and everything is quite as it ought to be. Now do you really think the capable business women of to-day are letting their abilities be spent in useless rebellion against their fate and loving the members of the firm in Victorian fashion or doing their work intelligently 258 and earning their wage? I hardly think there is room for an argument. You must understand that the years of errand girl, night school, underpaid clerk have taken out of us a certain capacity for enjoyment which you women have had emphasized. But thank God it has also taken from us a capacity for hysterical suffering, for going on the rocks when we see some joy we crave yet know can never be ours!”
“Oh!” Beatrice murmured, wishing Steve would come in or else Mary be called to the telephone. “Oh–––”
“But I do think there is a certain justice developed among modern business women which home women do not comprehend as a rule. Oh, not that I underestimate the home women or the sheltered women. There is a distinction between the two––but I say that the business woman who earns a man’s wage and does his work has a certain squareness, for want of a better term, which makes her say, ‘If I earn something it is mine and I shall not hesitate thus to label it. Look out––any one who tries to take it from me!’ Do you see?”
Mary paused, annoyed at what she had been prevailed upon to say, and wondering if by good fortune her opinions had been delivered to empty ears.
“So you think you would fight for something to which you felt entitled?”
“Perhaps.” The gray eyes had a warrior’s strength in them. “Fight, win it, and then spend no time in sentimental regrets. We learn one thing that all women should learn in this great age of selection: That you must earn the things you win, and that if you do so you will most likely keep them.”
“And if you felt that you had earned something––and another woman had not––you would play off the conqueror and take the spoils?”
“If I felt it the right thing to do.”
Feeling as confused as a bank cashier when caught studying a railroad map Mary hastened to suggest a picture of Beatrice handsomely framed as a surprise for Steve. She was sure he would like nothing any better.