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If I were a philosopher investigating your mind, I should say that you possessed imagination, but not reason. You throw yourself so whole-heartedly into our thoughts, so cling to our habits, so obey our speech, that your mind jumps with us - Les beaux esprits se rencontrent; and if you have not a bel esprit, then man and dog never loved one another. You feel as we feel, and all the more deeply that your energies are not diluted by the abstract.

We touched just now on sex. It is my experience that you excel any bitch in this gift of imaginative sympathy. The bitches I have had hunt better than the dogs, are keener and more persistent. They possess more instinct and less reason or imagination. Perhaps the same is true in our own species; and, as in races of men, some have more of the feminine, some more of the masculine attributes. I find differences in kind between little dogs and big dogs. The toy dog is very clever. It is on record that one who became a great stealer of eggs carried the emptied shells to the big dog's kennel. Such low cunning is beyond you, because it is outside your

character and desires. Your friendship and mine is wholly different from the relations of Mrs. X and her 'Peek.' By her responsive devotion she has spoiled his character, though perhaps increased his intelligence. He is almost a cat, considering his own comfort first and his mistress's desires second.

As I pause in my writing, I see you from the rug open one brown eye with watchful affection; and if I am weak at all you come up and rest your nose on my thigh for as long as I permit. My writing clothes are colored at that spot like a smoker's fingers. As my hand falls to that silky head of yours, a heave of contentment passes over your body; and I can only interpret the subtle change in your brown eyes as a look of affectionate gratitude.

With other big-browed spaniels and some retrievers, you have lost, in zeal to understand the human mind, many primeval instincts. You do not revolve three times, as if the world were still clothed in long grass, before settling to slumber. You do not dig holes and bury bones and bread. You have no trace of savagery when in pain. Twice, in walking with you over poacher-frequented ground, you have caught your foot in a snare and called me to release you. You licked my hand as I fumbled for it was cold with the taut wire. How different from my neighbor's terrier who, caught in a similar snare, bit savagely at his master's hand and could not be released till he was half smothered in a doffed coat. His leg was badly torn. You had lain quite still and even voluntarily helped to ease the strain.

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We most of us prefer to keep male dogs rather than female for reasons more elemental than psychological, and I have suggested that yours is the more reasoning and more sentimental sex; but the other has certain superiorities, both mental and physical, as I have

said. For instance, a spaniel bitch, belonging to an Irish correspondent of mine, was caught in one of the wires of which we have been speaking and could not be found. Though heavy with pup, she had strayed hunting. After ten long days she was at last discovered, emaciated to a skeleton, but alive and giving suck to nine puppies! You would have died of hunger and distress in half the time. Your mind would have strayed to a faithless master and wavered between anguish at his absence and self-pity at your own pain, till excess of emotion, till the poison of fear and hunger in combination, quite destroyed you. The bitches-so my inferences, perhaps from insufficient data, tell me - have the acuter senses, and, what is more, use two or three at a time, as you do not. Your nose is all in all. Your mother used her eyes wonderfully — though against proper etiquette in sporting dogs and was not subject to those accesses of deafness which overwhelm you when the scent is hot. She is much nearer the predomestic dog than you, and because her instincts are finer that other side of animal nature, which you have unbelievably developed, is less apparent. She is still a slave to the primal

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necessities of breeding and acquiring food. You have attained to such faith that you have thrown off such responsibilities and left yourself free to wonder at the divine genius of the provider.

Though I let you wander freely, it scarcely occurs to you to leave the garden. A walk with me is so much greater sport than a solitary ramble that you have half forgotten that the second is a pleasure at all. But when I promise a walk you even open the wicket gate, which leads to the fields, by yourself and hurry to the juncture of road and path to wait, in utter excitement, my decision. When the field path is chosen, every nerve in you tingles to delight. Companionship with that is your consummate pleasure; and if two animals enjoy companionship as you and I do, each must surely understand the other, by virtue of some sense of which this reason of our boasting is a mere branch. If you possess no reason, you are conscious of something better and more full of meaning even than instinct.

me

Ah, Whuff, there my letter ends. You can understand it as well as any human being in like case; for your short, short life is over. Can I bear to seek another companion?

ARE BUSINESS WOMEN GETTING A SQUARE DEAL?

BY ANNE W. ARMSTRONG

'We have not yet emerged,' a business woman said to me not long since, 'from the stage where the attitude of the business man toward us is somewhat his attitude toward an upper servant a mingled courtesy and condescension, with the condescension slightly more marked than the courtesy.'

Another business woman, to whom I repeated the remark, objected that it was too flattering to the business woman, implying a recognized need of her on the part of the business man. 'His feeling,' she said, 'toward the business woman, when the woman reaches a plane where it is difficult for him to ignore her presence, is more the one he has for a poor relation who has arrived on a visit a feeling of mixed annoyance and pity. He hopes that the visit will not be for longer than his gentlemanly instincts of hospitality can be reasonably expected to hold out. Business men in general,' she went on, 'are still filled with the idea that they will not have to endure forever this plague of business women that has been visited upon them. They simply will not face the fact,' she ended emphatically, 'that women have come into business to stay.'

Whatever business men may be thinking about the matter, business women, it is evident, have no intention of relinquishing such rights as they have established in the business world as squatters. It may or may not be true that the hardest phase of their

I

pioneering experience lies behind them. But they have at least reached a point where, in an effort to understand and cope with the present, they are beginning to look back.

A comprehensive history of the rise of the business woman has not yet been written. But roughly speaking I should say that the first stage extended from the eighteen-eighties well into the present century. During this stage any well-born woman who got what we now bluntly call a 'job' was an object of widespread pity. 'She had to go to work' is an expression that dates, as we say. It carried an implication of tragedy.

Business opportunities for women of the period were restricted, with few exceptions, to keeping a boarding house, clerking in a dry-goods shop, dressmaking, millinery. These occupations were all more or less declassing. It was a good many years before a woman with a taste for cookery was to have a vision of profit and prestige that would make of her, instead of a boarding-house drudge, the owner of a chain of tearooms and restaurants. A woman dry-goods clerk was socially submerged until the dignified high-paid position of woman buyer came into being. An even greater length of time was to elapse before a countess would turn modiste, thereby giving social sanction to still another occupation adapted to women's tastes and talents. As late as 1906, during a stay in Virginia I was

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witness to the struggles of a young woman trying to persuade her family that she would be happier trimming hats than accepting the only alternative that offered marriage to a neighbor. A year or so later the girl established herself as a milliner, though at the cost of a break with her family, who claimed she had disgraced their name. The effect of early martyrs upon the social coefficient of business women is sometimes overlooked.

This is especially true of almost the only other business choice open, during the period under consideration, to women forced to support themselves and others. The woman stenographer, now looked upon as holding the key position for women in business, survived under a heavy initial handicap of social disapproval. The first women stenographers were serious-minded, but they were soon under suspicion as a class because of the new relationship to men, and the symbolic conception of a stenographer by the late nineteenth century vested her with blonde hair, dyed, and with designs upon her employer. Thirty years ago there was such stigma attached to stenography that it took more than ordinary courage for a girl who was at all sensitive to adopt it as a livelihood. But although the general feeling of compassion for any woman not of the factory or servant class-who 'had to go to work' stopped short of the stenographer, she pitied herself. Consider for a moment this young woman who broke a path into business for the endless procession that has followed. She had never even heard of 'economic independence' as applied to women. The idea of business as a 'glorious opportunity' for herself, or for any other woman, was one she could not have reached by the uttermost stretch of her imagination. She thought - what almost everybody else thought at the

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time that business could never be anything for a woman but, a sad necessity.

No longer than ten years ago women felt humiliated if their circumstances drove them unexpectedly into business. Doubtless even yet there are women confronted with the prospect of 'jobs' for themselves who are not entirely free from this feeling. Traces of the sentiment linger, moreover, according to the more vigorous and outspoken of his critics, with a connotation of contempt, in the business man's contemporary attitude toward the business woman. But in any prevailing sense pity for women in business has to-day all but spent itself.

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It gave way by imperceptible degrees to a new situation. The 'female help,' as many old-fashioned employers still call women in business, at first aroused little interest on the part of the business man, and no concern. In an incredibly short space of time, however, the movement of women into business was greatly accelerated. A chivalrous impulse-an impulse to protect her, if I understand it correctly-was called forth by the business man's sudden perception of woman close at hand, in his everyday business life. There was something a trifle piquant, rather appealing, in her advent. There was as yet, it must be remembered, no expectation that the female help would ever occupy any but unimportant positions. During this friendly interlude women in business began to find themselves; began to branch out, unobserved at the start, into innumerable new directions. Helen Woodward, in her illuminating work, Through Many Windows, crystallizes this moment in the business woman's ascent - idyllic in retrospect by a perfect example. In offices where she worked twenty years ago men would address her as 'Sister.'

But business women, as well as business men, have outgrown such simplicity. Throughout the length and breadth of the business world of 1927 it would be, I imagine, impossible to discover a man who calls a woman working for or with him 'Sister.' 'Sister' struck the last note in an episode which it would be pleasant to dwell on. In it was no suggestion of a tone shortly afterward sounded in the phrase, 'woman's invasion.' Whoever originated this strident term, it was plain that the old settlers had at last taken alarm.

II.

For a while the alarm was hardly more than a vague uneasiness. If women kept coming into business, what would happen? Twenty years ago, or less, a man could issue a challenge to feminism, such as John Macy's recent Equality of Woman with Man: A Myth, without being suspected of having his tongue in his cheek. There was still no feeling that woman could ever be the business rival of man. The most insignificant man in business. could bolster himself up with the thought that he was, after all, a male. But he now received one jolt after another in rapid succession. He saw the business woman occupy position after position that it had been supposed no woman could fill. As a result, paradoxically, his condescension stiffened, rather than relaxed. The third stage in the business woman's development seems distinctly marked by this new attitude toward her, with its hint, for the first time, of hostility. Driven to the last refuge, his historic position, so business women explain the matter to themselves, he felt that he could scarcely assume too lofty a mien.

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But this accounts in part only for what appears to be the business man's

present view. One of the business women I have quoted advanced a plausible theory of its origin. She pointed out that the first woman with whom the business man had close contact in business, his personal stenographer (later known as a secretary), was, as a rule, his social as Iwell as his educational inferior. She seldom had completed high school, if, indeed, she had more than finished the grammar grades. Often she had learned shorthand at night school while working by day at the bench. To such a girl 'the boss' was a great man. If he looked down upon her, obviously it was because she looked up to him with more than ordinary humility. The personal stenographer's value was, in fact, for a long time rated according to her doglike fidelity. Modern business is still sprinkled with relics of this type. But, speaking generally, the business man's secretary to-day is more often a college graduate than he is himself. The variety and number of her interests equal his own, and the character of their social backgrounds and connections is often almost identical. Conditions have completely changed. Despite this fact, there seems little doubt, in view of the evidence, that the business man's early impression of the business woman has colored to some extent his whole later outlook.

The influence of this early impression marches on and on. The latest college graduate to enter a business organization from New Haven, Cambridge, or Chicago, though he may be amenable, even timid, in other directions, nevertheless, taking his cue from a mental attitude which he recognizes in business men who have arrived, begins to bully the business woman he finds handiest; yet she may be fifteen years ahead of him in business experience.

I used to be puzzled by the behavior

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