"Girls of Thomasine's station," said Mrs. LeGrand, "are beginning more and more, I'm sorry to see, to leave home to work for pay. It's spreading, too; it's not confined to girls of her class. Only yesterday I heard that a bright, pretty girl that I used to know at the White had gone to Philadelphia to study to be a nurse, and there's Nellie Wynne trying to be a journalist! A journalist! There isn't the least excuse for either of those cases. One of those girls has a brother and the other a father quite able to support them."
"But if there really isn't any one?" said Hagar wistfully. "And if you feel that you are costing a lot--" Her dreams at night were beginning to be shot with a vague but insistent "If I could write--if I could paint or teach--if I could earn money--"
"There is almost always some one," answered Mrs. LeGrand. "And if a girl knows how to make the best of herself, there inevitably arrives her own establishment and the right man to take care of her. If"--she shrugged--"if she doesn't know how to make the best of herself, she might as well go work in a store. No one would especially object. That is, they would not object except that when that kind of thing creeps up higher in the scale of society, and girls who can perfectly well be supported at home go out and work for pay, it makes an unfortunate kind of precedent and reacts and reflects upon those who do know how to make the best of themselves."
Hagar spoke diffidently. "But a lot of women had to work after the war. Mrs. Lane and General ----'s daughters, and you yourself--"
"That is quite different," said Mrs. LeGrand. "Gentlewomen in reduced circumstances may have to battle alone with the world, but they do not like it, and it is only hard fate that has put them in that position. It's an unnatural one, and they feel it as such. What I am talking of is that nowadays you see women--young women--actually choosing to stand alone, actually declining support, and--er--refusing generally to make the best of themselves. It's part of the degeneracy of the times that you begin to see women--women of breeding--in all kinds of public places, working for their living. It's positively shocking! It opens the gate to all kinds of things."