STARTING OUT.

Timaru Herald, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 11980, 31 January 1903, Page 3 (Supplement)

STARTING OUT.

(By MARY STEWART CUTTING, 111 "Colliers Weekly.")

Women axe kept irom starting out on new money-making undertakings k>y the queerest things—hesitations and baitings and shynesses inconceivable to man. I knew a woman who delayed for "weeks from putting in an application to an office in a certain lai-ge building in a city because she couldn't find out beforehand at which of the four doors she -was to enter. This especial lack of knowledge presented itself to her as an absolutely insurmountable barrier. The first step of the way must be perfectly clear before tfhe could start forward at all, although she was really clever, ordinarily self-reliant, and quite capable of earning a living for herself if she were first set on her own two feminine feet in the right track.

It is here where the difficulty comes in: to begin alone, and find the path all by one's sell! And yet it is the only way ia which any but the most favoured of women can secure any success at all, as was found by another woman who conceived the scheme of putting a certain home product upon the market. It had been doing well in the exchange in her suburban town, and she believed that it could cover a larger and more permanent field. To do this would require the purchase of materials in large quantities, besides cooking utensils, jars, boxes of different kinds, packing, paper, labels, gilt cord, etc., and afterward the finding of a way to put the finished product upon the market. The plan was built up little by little within her bioin; she was fully convinced that it was a good one, but she remained inactive for four months because she really didn't know, how to begin; she felt as if there must be somebody to tell her. She had a little tentative way of remarking to a friend here and there, ''Do you know, I think my Pickled Sweets might really sell if I were to put them up in quantities and send them to the city?"

But the friend would invariably make the kind but uninterested reply, " Yes, indeed ! Why don't you?" and" change the subject before she got any further. At the end of the four months she went, one winter's day, secret and alone, with what she felt was the courage of a lioness, to the local express office and found out the rates per pound to near-by centres of trade. The expressman answered her questions quite as a matter of course. Thereupon she felt inspired. She proceeded, looking neither, to the right nor to the left, to the confectioner's and boldly inquired as to where he bought his supplies. The kind man told her at once, giving 'her the names and addresses of several firms in the wholesale trade, also quite as a matter of course.

The need of suffrage could never touch her. She was an emancipated woman from that hour. She had found out the practical application of that old rule which perusers of ancient volumes of '" Punch" may see so charmingly illustrated: If you want a thing done, do it yourself. All through a February of snow and sleet and mud the lady of the Pickled Sweets tramped the lowest West-side mercantile sections of New York that curve under the elevated railway trains. She dodged across black and slippery cobblestones, between carts and beer-waggons, and drays and trolley care, in their interminable processions and blockings of the thoroughfare, with the smell of mud, of smoke, of cinders, and in some districts an unhallowed odour of cheese, surcharging the thick atmosphere around her. But what a progress that was! What she asked was answered. One firm sent her to another n-ht-n necessary, with the furtherine remark. "You'll find Sugar and Spice more in your line than we are; they can fell you what you want." Everywhere she met with the prompt courtesy which respectable houses extend to those who have dealings with them. She found that she was not one solitary conspicuous individual, to be looked upon with wonder and suspicion, but an integral part

of a large and accredited army of women earning a living in a business way. And the strangest part of it all was then, and always would be to her, the fact that while she waited and bemoaned her incapacity and hesitated miserably, there n-as no one to give her a shove forward by so much as a little finger; but no sooner had she stepped out herself than almost every 'hand was a helping one, nor could she talk with the merest acquaintance without getting some further insight into what she sought.