Margarita Spalding Gerry

“ The days when the beauty from the backwoods electrified society by appearing in garb outlandish and not in style are past. It is by other things that one judges—the way the clothes are worn, the way muscles flow or jerk under supple surfaces, the quality of voice, and that indescribable something that testifies whether or not it is an evolved personality, sufficiently free from awkward egotism to make its instant sortie in search of its like. ”

“ But for the others, the climbers, cringing to those above them and, in turn, being victimized by other climbers who think the first have achieved—what are they but a colony of ants building up, with painful effort, the atoms of their ant-hill, only to have it scattered by the foot of a passer-by on a worthier errand? The changes of one season ought to prove it to you. You come back, after the absence of one summer, to find a new colony of ants building and the old horde with whom you thought you had achieved a sure position gone—for the most part. ”

“ A man finds himself in that bare desert in the middle of life—there is the sudden assurance of one's essential loneliness—the good one has gained seems a little shop-worn. And you have the daily association with some one whose job it is to please you, and whose smiles you don't know by rote, the reason for them or what they lead to. ”

“ The suttee at the death of a naval officer in the United States is more complete than that of the most exalted Brahman of India; it's not the widow only who is sacrificed, it is the man's whole family that go into eclipse. My mother had gone before, so I made suttee. Out of a whole city full of friends I can count hardly a dozen that I see more than once a year. My own special set has scattered to the four winds. It isn't that Navy people are afraid of the undesirably poor; they are too utterly sure of their own position for that. ”

“ The only man who can be anything but a pensioner on the government in this department is some one with a technical equipment who can build up the Bureau to give the country what it needs. And the only people who get good out of the social life in Washington are the ones who don't need it; men and women who, having won position, need recreation. ”

“ I said nothing, glad that I had the pretext of turning over a sheet of paper to see what the last words of the dictation were. But I wasn't sure what was coming.
"House full of a lot of people that I don't care a hang for!" he went on, rather savagely. "What's more, they don't give a hang for us—except the ones that think they're going to make something out of us. ”

“ In place of it were alternations of an almost contemptuous negligence with that uncomfortably personal emphasis that implies that the mere fact that you are a woman is, in some way, of extraordinary significance. ”

“ What if the head of our department doesn't ever make much difference with the work, he can make a great deal of difference in your comfort. He can be a chronic grouch or a petty tyrant, or in other ways make the situation rather difficult for a girl. ”

“ You take a man from a place where he has had to contend with other men to keep his footing, and put him down in a ready-made position where, even if there are many over him, there are also many under him to whom his small office seems little short of omnipotence—especially helpless, rather inefficient women whose position is dependent on him—it isn't wonderful that his chief diet, voluntarily or not, is flattery. ”

“ There was a sort of big simplicity in the man that made you have a curious mixture of feelings about him, an indulgence that you might have had for a child, tempered with respect—that is, if it wasn't fear. ”

“ But it was hopeless. One doesn't adapt oneself to a new profession after one is fifty. Moreover, I had a suspicion that his women-folks were worrying him.
One morning he came to the office with care enthroned upon his brow. By this time he had learned to discard the frock-coat, and wore quite "snappy" ready-made business clothes. We had plodded along through our correspondence for a time when he began to drop into long pauses and play absent-mindedly with the letter-opener on his desk. After a few minutes I grew restless.
"Is that all, Mr. Harris?" ”

“ Then, my wife she thought she'd like a few winters in Washington for Mattie—that's our girl. It's kind of rough where we live for Mattie, I guess; at least it has been since she went East to school and saw something different. They think there aren't many people out home for her to associate with. And I guess my wife is right, and it's time for me to have some position of authority."
"I understand, Mr. Harris," I said. And of course, anybody could see the whole thing. The meetings of the Congressional Club are jammed with just such mothers and daughters. ”

“ It was the not unusual situation when a girl who isn't exactly ancient—although, I assure you, she feels sometimes as it she were a hundred—or positively repulsive in appearance, is thrown with a man who—in fact, almost any kind of a man. I fancy it depends on what sort you are yourself what you make out of it. ”

“ We made a list of the ladies who were their immediate superiors in administrative circles, and of the Congressional people whom they might or might not call on as they wished—I could hazard a guess that they would wish. When I left them it was plain to be seen that their social campaign was being mapped out. I had some difficulty in being sufficiently blank to suggestions that they would not object to introductions to some of the Navy people. ”

“ Harris and Mattie are out meeting a lot more of the same pattern. They don't care whether I go with them or not. All I'm good for is to give them my name to have engraved in such fashionable letters that I wouldn't recognize it myself it I hadn't been told, and pay the bills. Ought to be grateful, I suppose, to be of use somewhere, but there just isn't any place where I fit in." He laughed an awkward little laugh, realizing that he had been rather over-communicative. The code seems to be that other women can know pretty much everything about a man except his family. ”

“ Harris; not in Washington, if it is anywhere. It's just hard work."
I dutifully called on the Harris ladies one afternoon soon after that. They were as simple types, in their way, as the Assistant Secretary; they were large women—the mother fat, the daughter raw-boned. They had been in Washington long enough to have good clothes. Clothes are the simplest problem always with women. With department stores and specialty shops and a little money there is no reason why every woman should not be as accurate a copy of the prevailing insanity in dress as any other, and on short notice, too. ”

“ I laughed. "I happen to be a woman, too," I said.
One week afterward the resignation of the Assistant Secretary was announced, to take effect the following month.
It really was more decent of me than they knew. It's going to make a lot more work for me. I'll have to break in a new Assistant Secretary.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1928.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1939, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 83 years or less. ”

“ Everybody calls first on the person higher up, you know. So that— Why, if you carried it on down, the clerks here would be the ones to call on Mrs. Harris, But I don't know that any one wants us particularly. We don't count socially, you see. ”