One hears a good deal of discussion (not in Canada) of the openings in the colonies for educated women. There is an English committee—the Committee of Colonial Intelligence for Educated Women—which, 'recognising the crying need of our colonies for the best type of educated women,' undertakes to furnish them with detailed, practical and up-to-date information, before advising them to go out. This committee hopes later on to found settlements in the colonies, where training, suitable to the needs of each colony, can be given, and centres can be formed to which the girls can return in the intervals of employment. There is much sense both in the recognition of the need for educated women in the colonies and in the perception that the most educated woman will be lost there unless she is prepared to be practical. The truth is that that same adaptability which is required of men in Canada is required of women also. They must first suit the country before they can hope to leave their mark on it. Educated women can leave their mark there by their inward, not by their outward, superiority.
Centres to which the girls can go in the first place, and to which they can return in the intervals of employment, are an excellent idea, and one which central or local government authorities in Canada would do well to support. Of course the Young Women's Christian Association already gives much help in this direction, but it cannot be expected to have branches everywhere. New towns and settlements are planned and put through very quickly in Canada, and wherever they result in creating a demand for women's work, some such centre for girls as near the railway depot as possible should be started. For one thing it would facilitate the engagement of girls, for another it would attract a better class. Probably the best openings of all for women in Canada—educated women, I mean—are in the big cities of the furthest West. In Vancouver and Victoria wealthy people reside who can afford to pay for such luxuries as private school-mistresses and governesses. And the supply of women is not so great there. Women also seem to be more employed there as hotel manageresses and under-manageresses, and as cashiers in hotels and offices. I never heard of women being real estate agents, but in a profession in which the arts of persuasion play a leading part, there seems no reason why they should not shine. Of bachelor girls, living their own lives, I have also never heard in the West. They could hardly have the hearts to do it with so many bachelor men wasting their lives around them.
On the whole, the position of woman in Canada is one of honourable toil lightened by the high consideration in which they are held. They have hardly as yet obtained that dominant super-man eminence which American women are said to occupy. That is, perhaps, because they have not gone in so much for that culture and social fastidiousness by the lack of which in themselves some American husbands are made to feel their inferiority. On the other hand they seem to keep their men folk contented, and remain contented with them. Divorce is, I believe, uncommon in Canada.
CHAPTER XXI
THE LAKES AMONG THE CLOUDS
Who thinks the Rockies only of a forbidding magnificence, of a grandeur always dark and fierce? Let him go to Lake Louise. The only phrase I know that fits it is that German one—märchenhaft schön—lovely as a scene of fairyland. Coming upon it suddenly, on a moonlight night, it seems so unlooked-for, so exquisite, that one says to oneself, 'Surely it will vanish like a dream.'
LAKE LOUISE, LAGGAN, ALBERTA