een well spoken of as a marketer, a cook, a neighbor who would take
care of your baby while you went visiting--because these tasks had
seemed worth while to her. She was more practical than either Panama or
herself believed. All these years she had, without knowing that she was
philosophizing, without knowing that there was a world-wide inquiry into
woman's place, been trying to find work that needed her. Her father's
death had freed her; had permitted her to toil for her mother, cherish
her, be regarded as useful. Instantly--still without learning that there
was such a principle as feminism--she had become a feminist, demanding
the world and all the fullness thereof as her field of labor.

And now, in this fumbling school, she was beginning to feel the theory
of efficiency, the ideal of Big Business.

For "business," that one necessary field of activity to which the
egotistic arts and sciences and theologies and military puerilities are
but servants, that long-despised and always valiant effort to unify the
labor of the world, is at last beginning to be something more than dirty
smithing. No longer does the business man thank the better classes for
permitting him to make and distribute bread and motor-cars and books. No
longer does he crawl to the church to buy pardon for usury. Business is
being recognized--and is recognizing itself--as ruler of the world.

With this consciousness of power it is reforming its old, petty,
half-hearted ways; its idea of manufacture as a filthy sort of
tinkering; of distribution as chance peddling and squalid shopkeeping;
it is feverishly seeking efficiency.... In its machinery.... But, like
all monarchies, it must fail unless it becomes noble of heart. So long
as capital and labor are divided, so long as the making of munitions or
injurious food is regarded as business, so long as Big Business believes
that it exists merely to enrich a few of the lucky or the well born or
the nervously active, it will not be efficient, but deficient. But the
vision of an efficiency so broad that it can be kindly and sure, is
growing--is discernible at once in the scientific business man and the
courageous labor-unionist.

That vision Una Golden feebly comprehended. Where she first beheld it
cannot be said. Certainly not in the lectures of her teachers, humorless
and unvisioned grinds, who droned that by divine edict letters must end
with a "yours truly" one space to the left of the middle of the page;