III

BELLE DA COSTA GREENE

This “live wire,” one of the outstanding personalities in New York, despite her youth, is the antithesis of the two previous examples of successful women in business, inasmuch as no judge on the bench nor surgeon at the Front ever had a severer training for his profession than she.  People who meet for the first time the young tutelar genius of Mr. Morgan’s Library, take for granted that any girl so fond of society, so fashionable in dress and appointments, and with such a comet’s tail of admirers, must owe her position with its large salary to “pull,” and that it is probably a sinecure anyway.

Little they know.

Belle Greene, who arrests even the casual if astute observer with her overflowing joie de vivre and impresses him as having the best of times in this best of all possible worlds, is perhaps the “keenest on her job” of any girl in the city of New York.  Let any of these superficial admirers attempt to obtain entrance, if he can, to the Library, during the long hours of work, and with the natural masculine intention of clinching the favorable impression he made on the young lady the evening before, and he will depart in haste, moved to a higher admiration or cursing the well-known caprice of woman, according to his own equipment.

For Miss Greene’s determination to be one of the great librarians of the world took form within her precocious brain at the age of thirteen and it has never fluctuated since.  Special studies during both school and recreation hours were pursued to the end in view:  Latin, Greek, French, German, history—­the rise and spread of civilization in particular, and as demonstrated by the Arts, Sciences, and Literature of the world.  When she had absorbed all the schools could give her, she took an apprenticeship in the Public Library system in order thoroughly to ground herself in the clerical and routine phases of the work.

She took a special course in bibliography at the Amherst Summer Library School, and then entered the Princeton University Library on nominal pay at the foot of the ladder, and worked up through every department in order to perfect herself for the position of University Librarian.

While at Princeton she decided to specialize in early printing, rare books, and historical and illuminated manuscripts.  She studied the history of printing from its inception in 1445 to the present day.  It was after she had taken up the study of manuscripts from the standpoint of their contents that she found that it was next to impossible to progress further along that line in this country, as at that time we had neither the material nor the scholars.  She has often expressed the wish that there had been in her day a Morgan Library for consultation.

When she had finished the course at Princeton she went abroad and studied with the recognized authorities in England and Italy.  Ten years, in fact, were spent in unceasing application, what the college boy calls “grind,” without which Miss Greene is convinced it is impossible for any one to succeed in any vocation or attain a distinguished position.  To all demands for advice her answer is, “Work, work, and more work.”