The Sturdy Oak Part 14

George summoned Betty by means of the buzzer, and asked her, with icy indignation, what she thought of that. But, as he was visibly bursting with impatience to say what _he_ thought of it, she gave him the opportunity.

"I thought you advanced women," he said, "were supposed to stand by each other--stand by all women--try to make things better for them. One for all--all for one. That sort of thing. But it really works the other way.

It's just because a woman owns those cottages that Miss Eliot won't have anything to do with them. She knows that women are unreasonable and hard to get on with in business matters, so she pa.s.ses the buck! Back to a man, if you please, who hasn't any more real responsibility for it than she has."

There was, of course, an 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 s.e.x," 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 att.i.tude of one making herself as comfortable as the heat of the day would permit, while she scowled over a voluminous typewritten doc.u.ment, 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 thought nothing about its looks one way or the other. It was rather red when Betty came in, and she was making it rapidly redder with the vigorous ministrations of a man's-size handkerchief.

She greeted Betty with a cordial "how-de-doo," motioned her to the other chair at the table (Betty had a fleeting wish that she might have dusted it before she sat down), and asked what she could do for her.

"I'm from Mr. Remington's office," Betty said, "Remington and Evans.

He wrote you a note this morning about some cottages that belong to a cousin of his, Mrs. Brewster-Smith."

"I answered that note by his own messenger," said E. Eliot. "He should have got the reply before this." "Oh, he got it," said Betty, "and was rather upset about it. What I've come for, is to urge you to reconsider."

E. Eliot smiled rather grimly at her blotting-pad, looked up at Betty, and allowed her smile to change its quality. What she said was not what she had meant to say before she looked up. E. Eliot was always upbraiding herself for being sentimental about youth and beauty in her own s.e.x. She'd never been beautiful, and she'd never been young--not young like Betty. But the upbraidings never did any good.

She said: "I thought I had considered sufficiently when I answered Mr.

Remington's note. But it's possible I hadn't. What is it you think I may have overlooked?"

"Why," said Betty, "George thought the reason you wouldn't take the cottages was because a woman owned them. He used it as a sort of example of how women wouldn't stick together. He said that you probably knew that women were unreasonable and hard to deal with and didn't want the bother."

It disconcerted Betty a little that E. Eliot interposed no denial at this point, though she'd paused to give her the opportunity.

"You see," she went on a little breathlessly, "I'm for women suffrage and economic independence and all that. I think it's perfectly wonderful that you should be doing what you are--showing that women can be just as successful in business as men can. Of course I know that you've got a perfect _right_ to do just what a man would do--refuse to take a piece of business that wasn't worth while. But--but what we hope is, and what we want to show men is, that when women get into politics and business they'll be better and less selfish."

"Which do you mean will be better?" E. Eliot inquired. "The politics and the business, or the women?"

"I mean the politics and the business," Betty told her rather frostily.

Was the woman merely making fun of her?

E. Eliot caught the note. "I meant my question seriously," she said. "It has a certain importance. But I didn't mean to interrupt you. Go ahead."

"Well," Betty said, "that's about all. George--Mr. Remington--that is--is running for district attorney, and he has come out against suffrage as you know. I thought perhaps this was a chance to convert him a little. It would be a great favor to him, anyway, if you took the cottages; because he doesn't know whom to turn to, if you won't. I didn't come to try to tell you what your duty is, but I thought perhaps you hadn't just looked at it that way."

"All right," said E. Eliot. "Now I'll tell you how I do look at it. In the first place, about doing business for women. It all depends on the woman you're doing business with. If she's had the business training of a man, she's as easy to deal with as a man. If she's never had any business training at all, if business doesn't mean anything to her except some vague hocus-pocus that produces her income, then she's seven kinds of a Tartar.

"She has no more notion about what she has a right to expect from other people, or what they've a right to expect from her, than a white Angora cat. Of course, the majority of women who have property to attend to have had it dumped on their hands in middle life, or after, by the wills of loving husbands. Those women, I'll say frankly, are the devil and all to deal with. But it's their husbands' and fathers' fault, and not their own. Anyhow, that isn't the reason I wouldn't take those cottages.

"It was the cottages themselves, and not the woman who owned them, that decided me. That whole Kentwood district is a disgrace to civilization.

The sanitary conditions are filthy; have been for years. The owners have been resisting condemnation proceedings right along, on the ground that the houses brought in so little rental that it would be practical confiscation to compel them to make any improvements. Now, since the war boon struck the mills, and every place with four walls and a roof is full, they're saying they can't afford to make any change because of the frightful loss they'd suffer in potential profits.

"Well, when you agree to act as a person's agent, you've got to act in that person's interest; and when it's a question of the interest of the owners of those Kentwood cottages, whether they're men or women, my idea was that I didn't care for the job."

"I think you're perfectly right about it," Betty said. "I wouldn't have come to urge you to change your mind, if I had understood what the situation was. But," here she held out her hand, "I'm glad I did come, and I wish we might meet again sometime and get acquainted and talk about things."

"No time like the present," said E. Eliot. "Sit down again, if you've got a minute." She added, as Betty dropped back into her chair, "You're Elizabeth Sheridan, aren't you?--Judge Sheridan's daughter? And you're working as a stenographer for Remington and Evans?"

Betty nodded and stammered out the beginning of an apology for not having introduced herself earlier. But the older woman waved this aside.

"What I really want to know," she went on, "if it isn't too outrageous a question, is what on earth you're doing it for--working in that law office, I mean?"

It was a question Betty was well accustomed to answering. But coming from this source, it surprised her into a speechless stare.

"Why," she said at last, "I do it because I believe in economic independence for women. Don't you? But of course you do."

"I don't know," said E. Eliot. "I believe in food and clothes, and money to pay the rent, and the only way I have ever found of having those things was to get out and earn them. But if ever I make money enough to give me an independent income half the size of what yours must be, I'll retire from business in short order."

"Do you know," said Betty, "I don't believe you would. I think you're mistaken. I don't believe a woman like you could live without working."

"I didn't say I'd quit working," said E. Eliot. "I said I'd quit business. That's another thing. There's plenty of real work in the world that won't earn you a living. Lord! Don't I see it going by right here in this office! There are things I just itch to get my hands into, and I have to wait and tell myself 'some day, perhaps!' There's a thing I'd like to do now, and that's to take a hand in this political campaign for district attorney. It would kill my business deader than Pharaoh's aunt, so I've got to let it go. But it would certainly put your friend George Remington up a tall tree."

"Oh, you're a suffragist, then?" Betty exclaimed eagerly. "I was wondering about that. I've never seen you at any of our meetings."

"I'm a suffragist, all right," said E. Eliot, "but as your meetings are mostly held in the afternoons, when I'm pretty busy, I haven't been able to get 'round.

"I'm curious about Remington," she went on. "I've known him a little, for years. When I worked for Allen, I used to see him quite often in the office. And I'd always rather liked him. So that I was surprised, clear down to the ground, when I read that statement of his in the _Sentinel_.

I'd never thought he was _that_ sort. And from the fact that you work in his office and like him well enough to call him George one might almost suppose he wasn't."

Clearly Betty was puzzled. "Of course," she said, "I think his views about women are obsolete and ridiculous. But I don't see what they've got to do with liking him or not, personally."

E. Eliot's smile became grim again, but she said nothing, so Betty asked a direct question.

"That was what you meant, wasn't it?"

"Yes," the other woman said, "that was what I meant. Why, if you don't mind plain speaking, it's been my observation that the sort of men who think the world is too indecent for decent women to go out into, generally have their own reasons for knowing how indecent it is; and that when they spring a line of talk like that, they're being sickening hypocrites into the bargain."

Betty's face had gone flame color.

"George isn't like that at all," she said. "He's--he's really fine. He's old-fas.h.i.+oned and sentimental about women, but he isn't a hypocrite. He really means those things he says. Why..."

And then Betty went on to tell her new friend about Cousin Emelene and Alys Brewster-Smith, and how George, though he writhed, had stood the gaff.

"A grown-up man," E. Eliot summed up, "who honestly believes that women are made of something fine and fragile, and that they ought to be kept where even the wind can't blow upon them! But good heavens, child, if he really means that, it makes it all the better for what I was thinking of. You don't understand, of course. I hadn't meant to tell you, but I've changed my mind.

"Listen now. That statement in the _Sentinel_ has set the town talking, of course, and stirred up a lot of feeling, for and against suffrage.

But what it would be worth as an issue to go to the mat with on election day, is exactly nothing at all. You go out and ask a voter to vote against a candidate for district attorney because he's an anti-suffragist, and he'll say, 'What difference does it make? It isn't up to him to give women the vote. It doesn't matter to me what his private opinions are, as long as he makes a good district attorney!' But there is an issue that we _can_ go to the mat with, and so far it hasn't been raised at all. There hasn't been a peep." She reached over and laid a hand on Betty's arm.

"Do you know what the fire protection laws for factories are? And do you know that it's against the law for women to work in factories at night?