I
SHE found employment in the Bureau of War Risk Insurance.
Though the armistice with Germany was signed a few weeks
after her coming to Washington, the work of the bureau continued.
She filed correspondence all day; then she dictated
answers to letters of inquiry. It was an endurance of
monotonous details, yet she asserted that she had found "real work."
Disillusions she did have. She discovered that in the
afternoon, office routine stretches to the grave. She discovered that
an office is as full of cliques and scandals as a Gopher Prairie
She discovered that most of the women in the government
bureaus lived unhealthfully, dining on snatches in their
crammed apartments. But she also discovered that business
women may have friendships and enmities as frankly as men
and may revel in a bliss which no housewife attains—a free
Sunday. It did not appear that the Great World needed her
inspiration, but she felt that her letters, her contact with
the anxieties of men and women all over the country, were
a part of vast affairs, not confined to Main Street and a kitchen
but linked with Paris, Bangkok, Madrid.
She perceived that she could do office work without losing
any of the putative feminine virtue of domesticity; that cooking
and cleaning, when divested of the fussing of an Aunt
Bessie, take but a tenth of the time which, in a Gopher
Prairie, it is but decent to devote to them.
Not to have to apologize for her thoughts to the Jolly
Seventeen, not to have to report to Kennicott at the end of the
day all that she had done or might do, was a relief which made
up for the office weariness. She felt that she was no longer
one-half of a marriage but the whole of a human being.
