She has just purchased it because of the increasing scarcity of tonnage in which to transport the fire brick that she is buying for the reconstruction of factory furnaces in the devastated districts of France. Yesterday she shipped 90 cwt. of oil boxes and bearings and 6 railway coal wagons. In the past few months she has sent over some 2000 railway wagons. Like this, during the past year, she has expended a million dollars for railway rolling stock that she rents to the French Government. She is specially commissioned by France for this undertaking, as her _Commission Internationale de Ravitaillement_ spread in front of my breakfast roll shows to me and all of the Allies. A shipper has to have a license like this in these days. It is what secures for her her export permit from the London Board of Trade. Now she sets down her coffee cup and folds her newspaper and is off for India House in Kingsway where fore-gather other merchants who have confidential appointments with the War Office and the English Government. Upon her decisions to-day will depend so much more than the selection of a ribbon to match the blue of her eyes or the choice of the card to win at an afternoon bridge whist party. Her care and her forethought, her planning and her enterprise must outwit even the German submarines and get the goods across the English Channel to keep the transportation lines of a nation open for communication with the front. And there will be no superior at her elbow to tell her how. “I like big ventures. I like to do things myself. I’d sell flowers on the curb before I’d consent to be any one’s else employé,” the new woman in commerce flashed back at me as she buttoned her coat collar and started out in a ten o’clock morning fog. RISING TO THE NEW OCCASION You see, it’s like that. The big venture is the fascinating field that lies beyond humdrum directed routine. We have by now forgotten the stir that was created when perhaps thirty years ago the first woman walked into a business house to take her place at a typewriter desk. Let us not lose sight of the innovation of our own day that is about to command attention: the woman at the typewriter is rising. I think we shall see her take the chair before the mahogany desk in the president’s office.