but a semi-trained nurse who is competent to meet any and every emergency. The family traveling abroad or living on a country estate employs a governess who could fill the post of teacher in a fashionable preparatory school and whose position combines the duties of pedagogue and chaperon.
The general, and, alas, often incompetent "companion" has no place in the present-day organization of households. Her refinement, her social connections, her "patience and sympathy," must be backed by special training for the work.
A pathetically large number of women in small inland cities and even towns imagine that they could succeed as social secretaries to newly-rich women or to social leaders who find their correspondence and charities a burden so grievous as to demand an assistant. Because these women know how to write graceful notes of invitation, acknowledgment, congratulation or condolence, how to receive guests, and how to pour tea in their own little parlors, they imagine that they could train the newly-rich woman in the social way she should go, or lift the correspondence burden from the shoulders of Miss Helen Gould or Mrs. Russell Sage.
In reality, only the woman of extraordinary executive ability and experience can fill either position. Social secretaries are born, not
