Just off from Central Park West in New York City, the Financial Centre for Women has been established in direct response to the war demand. Wall Street asked for it. Already 60 young women instructed in practical banking, investments, accountancy, and managerial duties have been sent out to fill responsible positions in the National Bank of Commerce, Morgan’s, the Federal Reserve and over half a dozen other of the leading banks of New York City. These young women have been given an intimate working knowledge of such mysteries as stop payments and certified checks, gold imports, cumulative and preferred shares and all the intricacies of the market and the terms in which “the street” talks. In the room with the green cloth covered table, about which sit these future financiers and captains of industry in training, there is a blackboard. See the chalk marked diagram. By the routes mapped out in those white lines, they have brought furs from Russia, wheat from Canada, sugar from Hawaii. And all the money transactions involved have been properly put through. Thoroughly familiarised like this with international operations, there is more to learn for the making of a financier. I doubt if any but a woman would think to teach it. Miss Elizabeth Rachel Wylie, who directs the Financial Centre, recalls her classes from the wide world of affairs through which they circle the globe, for personal instruction. They have now the groundwork of the knowledge with which a business man is familiar. And Miss Wylie adds earnestly, impressively the last lesson: “Don’t darn.” You see, captains of industry don’t. Even so much as an office boy who aspires to become a captain of industry doesn’t. And the woman in the office who spends her evenings mending her stockings and washing her handkerchiefs, misses, say, the moving pictures where the man in the office is adding to his stock of general information. This tendency to revert to type has been the fatal handicap of the past. By the faint beginnings of an intention to discard it, you differentiate the new woman in commerce from her predecessor the business woman. By way of discipline that girl there at the green cloth covered table, whose bag of war knitting hangs on the back of her chair the while she’s shipping furs from Russia, will leave it at home to-morrow. Cecile Bornozi wouldn’t have done a million dollars’ worth of business with the French Government the past year if she had stopped to knit. And if her thoughts had been on her stockings, she might have missed important details in railway rolling stock. In her room at the Hotel Savoy in London, I never saw a needle or thimble or spool of thread. But on her table I noticed _System_, the magazine of business. APPROACHING HIGH FINANCE IN FRANCE