I know the daughter of a wealthy and historic family, whose head—­he is precisely the type of the elderly, cold-blooded, self-righteous, self-conscious New York aristocrat of the stage—­will not permit her to gratify her desire to write for publication, “for,” saith he, “I do not wish to see my honored name on the back of works of fiction.”

I do not think, myself, that he has deprived the world of one more author, for if she had fiction in her brain-cells no parental dictum could keep it confined within the walls of her skull; but the point is that being a young woman of considerable energy and mental activity, she found mere society unendurable and finally persuaded her father to make her one of his secretaries.  She learned not only stenography and typewriting but telegraphy.  There is a private apparatus in their Newport home for her father’s confidential work, and this she manipulates with the skill of a professional.  If the fortunes of her family should go to pieces, she could find a position and support herself without the dismal and health-racking transition which is the fate of so many unfortunate girls suddenly bereft and wholly unprepared.

III

The snobbishness of this old gentleman is by no means a prerogative of New York’s “old families.”  One finds it in every class of American men above the industrial.  In Honore Willsie’s novel, Lydia of the Pines, an American novel of positive value, the father was a day laborer, as a matter of a fact (although of good old New England farming stock), earning a dollar and a half a day, and constantly bemoaning the fact; yet when “young Lydia,” who was obliged to dress like a scarecrow, wished to earn her own pin-money by making fudge he objected violently.  The itching pride of the American male deprives him of many comforts and sometimes of honor and freedom, because he will not let his wife use her abilities and her spare time.  He will steal or embezzle rather than have the world look on while “his” wife ekes out the family income.  The determined Frenchwomen have had their men in training for generations, and the wife is the business partner straight up to the haute bourgeoisie; but the American woman, for all her boasted tyranny over the busy male of her land, is either an expensive toy or a mere household drudge, until years and experience give her freedom of spirit.  This war will do more to liberate her than that mild social earthquake called the suffrage movement.  The rich women are working so hard that not only do they dress and entertain far less than formerly but their husbands are growing quite accustomed to their separate prominence and publicly admitted usefulness.  The same may be said of groups of women in less conspicuous classes, and when the war is over it is safe to say these women will continue to do as they please.  There is something insidiously fascinating in work to women that never