Will Kennicott drove to Minniemashie on Tuesday for
a delightful picnic.
CHAPTER XXXVII
I
SHE found employment in the Bureau of War Risk Insurance. Though the
armistice with Germany was signed a few weeks after her coming to
Washington, the work of the bureau continued. She filed correspondence
all day; then she dictated answers to letters of inquiry. It was an
endurance of monotonous details, yet she asserted that she had found
"real work."
Disillusions she did have. She discovered that in the afternoon, office
routine stretches to the grave. She discovered that an office is as full
of cliques and scandals as a Gopher Prairie She discovered that most
of the women in the government bureaus lived unhealthfully, dining
on snatches in their crammed apartments. But she also discovered that
business women may have friendships and enmities as frankly as men and
may revel in a bliss which no housewife attains--a free Sunday. It did
not appear that the Great World needed her inspiration, but she felt
that her letters, her contact with the anxieties of men and women all
over the country, were a part of vast affairs, not confined to Main
Street and a kitchen but linked with Paris, Bangkok, Madrid.
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