United States or Switzerland ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
And I'll begin at the bottom." She did. She relieved the attendant at the rest-room for an hour a day. Her only innovation was painting the pine table a black and orange rather shocking to the Thanatopsis. She talked to the farmwives and soothed their babies and was happy.
She had often glanced at the store-building which had been turned into a refuge in which farmwives could wait while their husbands transacted business. She had heard Vida Sherwin and Mrs. Warren caress the virtue of the Thanatopsis in establishing the rest-room and in sharing with the city council the expense of maintaining it. But she had never entered it till this March day.
When she attended her second meeting of the Thanatopsis she said nothing about remaking the town. She listened respectably to statistics on Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Scott, Hardy, Lamb, De Quincey, and Mrs. Humphry Ward, who, it seemed, constituted the writers of English Fiction and Essays. Not till she inspected the rest-room did she again become a fanatic.
You have already seen something of that nursery, its long row of windows facing the south, its awnings, toys, sand-piles and white-robed nurses. Since then Mary had had time to elaborate the original theme with a kitchen for preparing their majesties' food, linen closets and a rest-room for the nurses.
She preferred to rest here rather than in the "club-room and rest-room for women employees," on which Mr. Pemberton so prided himself. Una heard rumors of rest-rooms which were really beautiful, really restful; but at Pemberton's the room resembled a Far Rockaway cottage rented by the week to feeble-minded bookkeepers.
On the one hand she could not associate with the chiefs; on the other, it was expected of her in her capacity as daily confidante to one of the gods, that she should not be friendly, in coat-room or rest-room or elevator, with the unrecognized horde of girls who merely copied or took the bright young men's dictation of letters to drug-stores.
Nor did she neglect any of a multitude of petty details such as the amount of ice needed for the water cooler, the judicious issue of office supplies; the innovation of a rest-room for girls metamorphosed out of a hitherto dingy storeroom; the eradication of friction between two ancient bookkeepers who had come to regard the universe as against them.
Thitherto, the stenographers had wasted a great deal of time in trotting to the battery of water-coolers, in actually being human and relaxed and gossipy for ten minutes a day. After the visitation of the expert the girls were so efficient that they never for a second stopped their work except when one of them would explode in hysteria and be hurried off to the rest-room.
"We'll just send him down to our model factory here in the city and let him see how things are run. Convince him he's doing good, and that'll settle him! All white marble, with vines over the place, and a big rest-room and reading-room for the hands, gymnasium on the roof, model restaurant, all up to date. Cost a lot of money, too, but it pays!
And of course there's our women's study club the Thanatopsis Club." "Are they doing anything? Or do they read papers made out of the Encyclopedia?" Miss Sherwin shrugged. "Perhaps. But still, they are so earnest. They will respond to your fresher interest. And the Thanatopsis does do a good social work they've made the city plant ever so many trees, and they run the rest-room for farmers' wives.
Word Of The Day