ll be encouraged
to transfer themselves and their maidenly dreams to the great
dumping-ground of the world.

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 soc