Page:The Genius of America (1923).pdf/130

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type of the recent feminine "arrivals" in business. She will get on. If she had a shade less of adaptability and a shade more of "soul," she would have her difficulties.

I had recently an instructive conversation with a charming and thoroughly refined young woman, who, moved by the impulse of her time, was seeking "economic independence," and had taken her initial steps in the business world. I asked her what she had learned from her professional life. "The most important thing that I have tried to learn," she replied instantly but without much gusto, "is how to sell myself."

I wish I could say that the vile phrase struck me as shocking. But how can one be shocked any longer, whose ears have rung these half-dozen years with phrases struck at the same mint, "slogans" of the "nation-wide" "campaigners," "selling charity," "selling art," "selling the war," "selling patriotism," "selling the flag," "selling the church—yours in business for the Lord," "selling" things visible and things invisible, whatever is now for sale in the heavens above or the waters under the earth—and everything is for sale. Such is the idiom of their souls.

At the present moment "production" is looked upon as an undertaking for old men. Sales-