she is cordially liked by the men in her office. But if she persists in feeling that hats should be doffed and pipes laid by when she comes in, she will not make friends. The girl who goes to an opposite extreme and tries to make herself popular by smoking cigarettes, swinging her feet from the table, and betting on the races, will not achieve unbounded popularity, since it is necessary to stand well with the managing editor; but she who can retain her own refinement and good manners without surrounding herself with the air of superiority is liked by all classes. And yet, let her smother her love of refinement and persuade herself to enjoy a seat in the room where cuspidors are as numerous as desks, breathing an atmosphere of mingled tobacco smoke and profanity, for a few years, and her moral tone is sure to be blunted and her manner to take on a certain brusqueness not native to the delicately reared girl with college affinities. If she is honest with herself, she will own this, and question seriously whether the experience is worth while.
“But the work brings you into contact with so many delightful people!”’ Yes. But there are all kinds of people in the world, and the newspaper woman is pretty sure to meet them. Celebrities of all kinds become so familiar to her that the word “glamour” might well be eliminated from her dictionary. She learns to meet them on such off-hand, free-and-easy terms as to offend both the celebrities and the onlookers. It does not take her long to discover that geniuses are only men and women with some particular faculty a little more developed than the rest of us, and that usually some other faculty—too often that of common sense—is correspondingly stunted. Accordingly, she loses her reverence for geniuses. “We all look alike to our Maker,” is her motto, forgetting that our Maker, if he compares us at all, uses a standard quite unknown in the newspaper office. ‘The society woman and the club woman, too, become as transparent as glass to the keen-witted newspaper woman. There is a time, at the very first, when she is flattered by invitations to select club-gatherings and exclusive weddings; but she soon learns, sometimes by humiliating experience, that she is tolerated for the sake of the paper she represents. She will meet with some true and beautiful women who will never let it be seen that they appreciate any difference in station or education. But she will meet more who are polite only when they have something to gain by good manners. Women will try to bribe her into writing favorable reviews of their books or flowery descriptions of their gowns; and she will come to have no more respect for the one kind than the other. It will not take long for her to discover that not only her particular doll, but all the dolls in the world, are stuffed with sawdust. Distinguished actresses will send for her, give her tickets, ask her to their dressing-rooms or to go autoing. But let her cease to write for the dramatic or social departments, and where is she? Forgotten, like a last season’s play.
All this, taken as experience in the art of living, or preparatory to doing better work, may have a shaping purpose in her life. Some women who have tried it claim that it is all educatory in effect; I thought so once, myself. Now I question if I should not have been a sweeter, saner, healthier writer to-day if I had kept out of the roughening process and stuck to the country byways and hedges where songs spring easily alongside the peaceful road and idyls may be lived as well as imagined. It all comes to this: ask any newspaper woman who has worked hard and long at her profession, even her who has achieved an enviable record in it, if she would put her own young daughter into a daily newspaper office to work her way up. Her answer is, invariably, “No: a thousand times, no.”
Of course, there are positions, editorial positions on the weekly and monthly publications, where conditions are entirely different. The college-educated girl with
