Unless we legislate meanwhile.

V

FOUR OF THE HIGHLY SPECIALIZED

There are four other ways in which women (exclusive of the artist class) are enjoying remunerative careers:  as social secretaries, play brokers, librarians, and editors; and it seems to me that I cannot do better than to drop generalities in this final chapter and give four of the most notable instances in which women have “made good” in these highly distinctive professions.  I have selected four whom I happen to know well enough to portray at length:  Maria de Barril, Alice Kauser, Belle da Costa Greene, and Honore Willsie.  It is true that Mrs. Willsie, being a novelist, belongs to the artist class, but she is also an editor, which to my mind makes her success in both spheres the more remarkable.  To edit means hours daily of routine, details, contacts; mechanical work, business, that would drive most writers of fiction quite mad.  But Mrs. Willsie is exceptionally well balanced.

I

MARIA DE BARRIL

A limited number of young women thrown abruptly upon their own resources become social secretaries if their own social positions have insensibly prepared them for the position, and if they live in a city large enough to warrant this fancy but by no means inactive post.  In Washington they are much in demand by Senators’ and Congressmen’s wives suddenly translated from a small town where the banker’s lady hobnobbed with the prosperous undertaker’s family, to a city where the laws of social precedence are as rigid as at the court of the Hapsburgs and a good deal more complicated.  But these young women must themselves have lived in Washington for many years, or they will be forced to divide their salary with a native assistant.

The most famous social secretary in the United States, if not in the world, is Maria de Barril, and she is secretary not to one rich woman but to New York society itself.  Her position, entirely self-made, is unique and secure, and well worth telling.

Pampered for the first twenty years of her life like a princess and with all her blood derived from one of the oldest and most relaxed nations in Europe, she was suddenly forced to choose between sinking out of sight, the mere breath kept in her body, perhaps, on a pittance from distant relatives, or going to work.

She did not hesitate an instant.  Being of society she knew its needs, and although she was too young to look far ahead and foresee the structure which was to rise upon these tentative foundations, she shrewdly began by offering her services to certain friends often hopelessly bewildered with the mass of work they were obliged to leave to incompetent secretaries and housekeepers.  One thing led to another, as it always does with brave spirits, and to-day Miss de Barril has a position in life which, with its independence and freedom, she would not exchange for that of any of her patrons.  She conducted her economic venture with consummate tact from the first.  Owing to a promise made her mother, the haughtiest of old Spanish dames as I remember her, she never has entered on business the houses of the society that employs her, and has retained her original social position apparently without effort.