obvious retort to this; namely, that business
was business, and that a business woman had the same privilege a
business man had, of declining a job that looked as if it would entail
more bother than it was worth. But Betty couldn't quite bring herself
to take this line. Women, if they could ever get the chance (through
the vote and in other ways), were going to make the world a better
place--run it on a better lot of ideals. It wouldn't do to begin
justifying women on the ground that they were only doing what men did.
As well abandon the whole crusade right at the beginning.

George saw her looking rather thoughtful, and pressed his advantage.
Suppose Betty went and saw Miss Eliot personally, sometime today, and
urged her to reconsider. The business didn't amount to much, it was
true, and it no doubt involved the adjustment of some troublesome
details. But unless Miss Eliot would undertake it, he wouldn't know just
where to turn. Alys had quarreled with Allen, and Sampson was a skate.
And perhaps a little plain talk to Alys about the condition of the
cottages--"from one of her own sex," George said this darkly and looked
away out of the window at the time--might be productive of good.

"All right," Betty agreed, "I'll see what I can do. It's kind of hard to
go to a woman you barely know by sight, and talk to her about her duty,
but I guess I'm game. If you can spare me, I'll go now and get it over
with."

There were no frills about Edith Eliot's real estate office, though the
air of it was comfortably busy and prosperous.

The place had once been a store. An architect's presentation of an
apartment building, now rather dusty, occupied the show-window. There
was desk accommodation for two or three of those bright young men who
make a selection of keys and take people about to look at houses; there
was a stenographer's desk with a stenographer sitting at it; and back
of a table in the corner, in the attitude of one making herself as
comfortable as the heat of the day would permit, while she scowled over
a voluminous typewritten document, was E. Eliot herself. It was almost
superfluous to mention that her name was Edith. She never signed it, and
there was no one, in Whitewater anyway, who called her by it.

She was a big-boned young woman (that is, if you call the middle
thirties young), with an intelligent, homely face, which probably got
the attraction some people surprisingly found in it from the fact that
she thou