New York (N.Y.) -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction
From Robert, Janet had extracted a promise to supervise the department
of criticism and revision. Claude (this was before his flight in a fit
of pique) had refused to take the project seriously. Cornelia, in her
most pronounced _bel canto_ style, had volunteered to "lend a helping
hand" to the typewriting department and to give her moral support to
most of the other departments. As Janet’s last illusions about Cornelia
were being speedily dissipated, and as she judged that some birds in a
bush are worth ten in the hand, she contracted for Cornelia’s moral
support and nothing but her moral support in all the departments.
Then, as regards the legal department. Janet held that, in order to
round out her business in the most complete way, one member of the firm
ought to be equipped with a first-hand training in jurisprudence. She
saw nothing for it but to be this member herself, and accordingly she
had already made arrangements to attend the coming fall sessions of an
Evening Law School. Needless to say, this part of her dream had not
been so much as breathed to Claude.
Janet intended, as soon as she had passed her bar examination, to
specialize on all points of law bearing on literary and dramatic
productions, the rights of authors, and the relations between the buyers
and sellers of manuscripts. She had been put onto this idea by a popular
short-story writer, one of Mr. Grey’s friends. This man had assured her
that the literary field, on its legal side, was practically a virgin
field. Merchants, inventors, landlords, captains of industry and the
like could, where the law touched their spheres of influence, find
appropriate legal specialists with all the precedents, traditions,
decisions, appeals, evasions, etc., at their fingers’ ends. Authors
alone were in no such happy case. The legal background of authorship
was a vast morass of contradictions, quibbles and uncertainties. Authors
were frequently at sea in respect of their rights, constantly
handicapped in the matter of expert advice, and always liable to be done
in the eye by the more unscrupulous members of the fraternity of
editors, publishers, managers and agents.
This, then, was the field that Janet meant to conquer. She had a roseate
vision of Barr & Lloyd occupying a suite of offices on the lower end of
Madison or Park Avenue. If fortune favored her, these offices were to be
staffed with ambitious young women assistants whom she would help to
useful and honorable careers (as far as male prejudice and
discrimination would allow). Barr & Lloyd, in other words, besides
their primary business as manuscript practitioners, would have a
secondary mission, namely, that of multiplying the avenues along which
woman might march towards economic equality with men.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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