Page:Women Wanted.djvu/218

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202
WOMEN WANTED

have ever thus received a personal invitation to the wide open world of commerce. The League since its inception some five years ago has been alertly engaged in looking, as its name implies, for business opportunities for women. We have always been obliged to look pretty persistently for them. Never before have they been presented to us. Now, see, the way is clear, they tell us, right up the steeps of high finance.

The bursting bombs of war have done it. A ghastly Place aux Dames, it is in truth. But the stage is set. The cue is given. There is not even time to hesitate. Draughted, the long lines come on with steady tread. Now our battalions fall in step with the battalions of the Allies and the Central Powers. For English or Hun or French or Magyar or Russian or Serb or American, the woman movement is one like that. Through the same doorway of opportunity we all of us shall enter in. There are blood stains on the lintel, I know. But this door, for the first time set ajar, is the only way, it appears, between the past and the future. With the invitation from the New York School of Commerce on my desk before me, I too am at the threshold where the centuries meet. Down the vista that stretches before me, I look with long, long thoughts.

And once more, Cecile Bornozi somewhere in Europe is passing the sugar. In pursuit of food conservation, hotel waiters have a way of removing the sugar bowl to the dining room sideboard and thoughtfully forgetting to offer it a second time. And the