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Slowly and reluctantly she came to realize that Vivie Warren was
what is called an "ideal." There were no such girls and no such
positions. No work that offered was at all of the quality she
had vaguely postulated for herself. With such qualifications as
she possessed, two chief channels of employment lay open, and
neither attracted her, neither seemed really to offer a
conclusive escape from that subjection to mankind against which,
in the person of her father, she was rebelling. One main avenue
was for her to become a sort of salaried accessory wife or
mother, to be a governess or an assistant schoolmistress, or a
very high type of governess-nurse. The other was to go into
business --into a photographer's reception-room, for example, or
a costumer's or hat-shop. The first set of occupations seemed to
her to be altogether too domestic and restricted; for the latter
she was dreadfully handicapped by her want of experience. And
also she didn't like them. She didn't like the shops, she didn't
like the other women's faces; she thought the smirking men in
frock-coats who dominated these establishments the most
intolerable persons she had ever had to face. One called her
very distinctly "My dear!"
Two secretarial posts did indeed seem to offer themselves in
which, at least, there was no specific exclusion of womanhood;
one was under a Radical Member of Parliament, and the other under
a Harley Street doctor, and both men declined her proffered
services with the utmost civility and admiration and terror.
There was also a curious interview at a big hotel with a
middle-aged, white-powdered woman, all covered with jewels and
reeking of scent, who wanted a Companion. She did not think Ann
Veronica would do as her companion.
And nearly all these things were fearfully ill-paid. They carried
no more than bare subsistence wages; and they demanded all her
time and energy. She had heard of women journalists, women
writers, and so forth; but she was not even admitted to the
presence of the editors she demanded to see, and by no means sure
that if she had been she could have done any work they might have
given her. One day she desisted from her search and went
unexpectedly to the Tredgold College. Her place was not filled;
she had been simply noted as absent, and she did a comforting day
of admirable dissection upon the tortoise. She was so
interested, and this was such a relief from the trudging anxiety
of her search for work, that she went on for a whole week as if
she was still living at home. Then a third secretarial opening
occurred and renewed her hopes again: a position as
amanuensis--with which some of the lighter duties of a nurse were
combined--to an infirm gentleman of means living at Twickenham,
and engaged upon a great literary research to prove that the
"Faery Queen" was really a treatise upon molecular chemistry
written in a peculiar and picturesquely handled cipher.
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