When one considers there is no reason why she should have felt abashed. Such cases are so common that the woman not only continues to demand her pound of flesh after remarriage, but should the earnings of the first man materially increase, she goes to court and asks for a larger share. Nine cases out of ten she gets it. And why shouldn’t she? Having gone through the marriage ceremony not only prevents her from being classed with her twin sister, the woman of the street, but secures for her a share of any worldly goods that may come into the possession of the man until death them do part. If death should part them?—there she stands, next in order after the undertaker and the doctor, demanding her dower rights. Wives have rights!
Having stood the strain—reading the papers of draft-evaders and listening to the stories of the daughters of a horse-leech—until I longed to get off the earth, I asked to be transferred to the filing department. There my boss was an ex-milliner.
“I had a good little business,” she confided to me one day at lunch. “Five girls workin’ for me, and a boy to deliver. The war wiped me out.” She paused, picked at her paper napkin with her fork, then went on. “If I’d only known enough to stop when trade first begun to fall off!” She paused again, this time staring at me in a sort of breathless amazement. “I even used mother’s burial money—payin’ off my girls. She made me take it—we was both so sure the war would soon be over.”
“You’re replacing it now,” I suggested, trying to make my tone consoling—in the tenements for a child to use a parent’s burial fund is a mortal sin.
An expression of satisfaction, almost blissful in its depths, spread over her face and seemed to strengthen her whole person. “I’m doing it though there isn’t any need. Mother’s makin’ bigger money than me. She is company-companion to a rich lady—don’t have to do no work of any kind, just walks out with the old lady and helps her in and out the limmossin when they goes drivin’. The trained nurse who waited on the old lady went to France.”
“Does she give your mother the same wages?” I asked.
“Sure. Forty a week. You oughter see the eats she brings home nights. Last night she had a baked chicken—only the wings and a little of the breast had been cut off. The cook told mother she might as well take it—the help was tired of chicken. Somehow—” She paused thoughtfully, a troubled look clouding her eyes, then added wistfully: “Somehow I can’t just fancy folks havin’ good things to eat so constant that they’d get tired of baked chicken, can you?”