While John was doing his last year in engineering school, Mary did a year of technical study in the New York School of Philanthropy, or in the St. Louis School of Social Economy, or in the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, or in the Boston School for Social Workers.
They won’t even let you start in “doing good” nowadays without some training for it. This is wise, considering how much harm doing good can do.
But how the preparation for life does lengthen itself out!
Mary took a civil-service examination and got a job with the State Bureau of Labor. She finished her first year with the Bureau at the same time that John finished his first year with the electrical firm. She had earned $600. He had earned $480.
There were several hundred other apprentices in the shops along with John. When he thought of the next year’s work at fifty a month and when he looked at the horde of competing Bachelors 13 of Science in which he was pocketed, he whitened a bit.
“I must get out of the ruck,” he said to himself. “I must get a specialty. I must do some more preparing.”
He began to perceive how long it takes the modern man to grow up, intellectually and financially. He began to perceive what a tedious road he must travel before he could arrive at maturity—and Mary!
But he had pluck. “I’ll really prepare,” he said, “and then I’ll really make good.”
A Western university offered a scholarship of $500 a year, the holder of which would be free to devote himself to a certain specified technical subject. John tried for the scholarship and got it, and spent a year chasing electrical currents from the time when they left the wheels of street cars to the time when they eventually sneaked back home again into the power house, after having sported clandestinely along gas mains and water pipes, biting holes into them as they went.
It was a good subject, commercially. At the end of the year he was engaged as engineer by a 14 street-car company which was being sued by a gas company for allowing its current to eat the gas company’s property. He was to have a salary of $1,000 a year. He was going strong.