It is the first time that I and the League for Business Opportunities for Women to which I belong, have ever thus received a personal invitation to the wide open world of commerce. The League since its inception some five years ago has been alertly engaged in looking, as its name implies, for business opportunities for women. We have always been obliged to look pretty persistently for them. Never before have they been presented to us. Now, see, the way is clear, they tell us, right up the steeps of high finance. The bursting bombs of war have done it. A ghastly _Place aux Dames_, it is in truth. But the stage is set. The cue is given. There is not even time to hesitate. Draughted, the long lines come on with steady tread. Now our battalions fall in step with the battalions of the Allies and the Central Powers. For English or Hun or French or Magyar or Russian or Serb or American, the woman movement is one like that. Through the same doorway of opportunity we all of us shall enter in. There are blood stains on the lintel, I know. But this door, for the first time set ajar, is the only way, it appears, between the past and the future. With the invitation from the New York School of Commerce on my desk before me, I too am at the threshold where the centuries meet. Down the vista that stretches before me, I look with long, long thoughts. [Illustration: MISS ELIZABETH RACHEL WYLIE Of the Financial Centre for Women in New York, who stands at the open door in commerce to usher in the women of America. ] And once more, Cecile Bornozi somewhere in Europe is passing the sugar. In pursuit of food conservation, hotel waiters have a way of removing the sugar bowl to the dining-room sideboard and thoughtfully forgetting to offer it a second time. And the pretty young woman in the chic hat, who sat opposite me at breakfast that morning, was near enough to reach it and daring enough to commandeer the sugar bowl for our common use. There is nothing, I believe, like a lump of sugar that so quickly makes war-time travellers kin. That is the way I came to know Cecile Bornozi, new woman in commerce. She is a type distinct from her predecessors in that old world of ours that is going up in battle smoke. Her brown hair is done in as coquettish a curl on her forehead, her eyes are as sparkling blue, her lips are as curving red as any girl’s who used to have nothing to do but to dance the tango and pour afternoon tea. But her horizon has widened beyond the drawing-room. Nor is she the business woman whom we have had with us for a generation. Why, the stenographer who takes my dictation is a business woman. But from her hand bag as another woman might produce a shopping list, Cecile Bornozi has just drawn forth a $50,000 bill of sale to her for a freight steamer.