and hopelessly after their
introduction as before; and she suspected that there was something wrong
with a social system in which time-saving devices didn't save time for
anybody but the owners. She was not big enough nor small enough to have
a patent cure-all solution ready. She could not imagine any future for
these women in business except the accidents of marriage or death--or a
revolution in the attitude toward them. She saw that the comfortable
average men of the office sooner or later, if they were but faithful and
lived long enough, had opportunities, responsibility, forced upon them.
No such force was used upon the comfortable average women!

She endeavored to picture a future in which women, the ordinary,
philoprogenitive, unambitious women, would have some way out besides
being married off or killed off. She envisioned a complete change in the
fundamental purpose of organized business from the increased production
of soap--or books or munitions--to the increased production of
happiness. How this revolution was to be accomplished she had but little
more notion than the other average women in business. She blindly
adopted from Mamie Magen a half-comprehended faith in a Fabian
socialism, a socializing that would crawl slowly through practical
education and the preaching of kinship, through profit-sharing and
old-age pensions, through scientific mosquito-slaying and cancer-curing
and food reform and the abolition of anarchistic business competition,
to a goal of tolerable and beautiful life. Of one thing she was sure:
This age, which should adjudge happiness to be as valuable as soap or
munitions, would never come so long as the workers accepted the
testimony of paid spokesmen like S. Herbert Ross to the effect that they
were contented and happy, rather than the evidence of their own wincing
nerves to the effect that they lived in a polite version of hell.... She
was more and more certain that the workers weren't discontented enough;
that they were too patient with lives insecure and tedious. But she
refused to believe that the age of comparative happiness would always be
a dream; for already, at Herzfeld & Cohn's she had tasted of an
environment where no one considered himself a divinely ruling chief, and
where it was not a crime to laugh easily. But certainly she did not
expect to see this age during her own life. She and her fellows were
doomed, unless they met by chance with marriage or death; or unless they