Evening Star Newspaper, December 7, 1930, Page 94

VERYWHERE about her, ever since she could remember, she had heard the bright patter about economic independence of women. It was won- derful to belong so irrefutably to a world of women which had asserted its right to venture unchallenged into certain fields of work-a-day activities hitherto reserved for the exploits of men. If any one had out and out asked Emanie if she were a suffragette, her reply would have been evasive, non-commital and unconsciously not quite honest, One did not have to be so stern and un- compromising an advocate as that! Emanie did not intend te let herself get “sfrong-mind- ed” about it. Those were the sort of women who defeated their own cause; antagonized the men and alienated the women. Emanie was not particularly concerned about the vote, even as a symbol to this much-her- alded emancipation. Women’s party member- ship. Not much! All very well and good for those women who wanted to risk their looks and their charm and their desirabiliy, catching trains for Washington to get bills introduced and abuses defeated. Of course, some one had to do it, and certain kinds of women were mag- nificent for the job. NOMIC independence to Emanie was just a pleasant isolated fact. Forty-five dollars & week as confidential secretary to a life insur- ance company's vice president, who seldom came to his office more than three two-hour mornings & week, and who placed_implicit con- fidence in his secretary’s competence to cope with the honorary duties of his largely hon- orary position, left Emanie free to enjoy to their fullest the economic advantages of a good salary, an extraordinary amount of leisure and & pleasant apartment, in which she had the time, taste and money to entertain with judg- ment and skill, ‘ It was not surprising that a young woman in her position, good-looking in a brown, sleek- haired slender and efficient sort of way; chic because she could afford to dress well; alert because she had leisure and money for lectures, books, concerts and theaters, should think twice, nay thrice, before she considered anything so drastic as marriage. Marriage, even into conditions which bet- tered hers materially, was something at which to look askance. Her position was so right. 8o secure. So free. Even a marriage that bet- tered materially was gravely liable to pitfalls. But it so happened that the opportunity of marriage which presented itself to Emanie was not one to better her position in the worldly sense of the word. Thomas Maugham's earnings were about the same as Emanie’s, and his work in a large Middle West city would have made it impos- g sible for Emaine to continue hers in the East. Besides, Thomas, in that curiously gentle way of his, was out-and-out about what he wanted where Emanie’s activities were concerned. All well and good for women to go out into business and careers after marriage. Thomas was the last person to have an attitude about it in general, but he wasn’'t going to make any bones about his attitude in particular. Let the future take care of itself. But for the first year or two or three, at least, Thomas wanted Emanie in his home. After that—well, time to talk about it. Neither was Thomas the one to bicker about the fact of children. He wanted them and he wanted them while he and Emanie were still young enough to enjoy youth with their off- spring.© All in all, it looked as if Thomas’ idea about the future, which he was apparently so willing to It take care of itself, was pretty well laid out. Freight Cars ONE system of shipment of fresh fruits and vegetables which gave promise at one time of developing into a regular, large-scale meth- od, seems to have run up against factors which will limit its growth to small cities of the Western Rocky Mountain and Southern re- gions. The system in question is the mixed- car shipment, in which less than carload lots of various kinds of produce are gathered to- gether in one car for shipment to smaller mar- kets, where carload lots of the individual fruiis and vegetab'es would be too great for the mar- ket to absorb. A survey conducted by the Bureau of Agri- cultural Economics has revealed that since 1922 the annual mixed-car shipments have in- creased from 30,000 cars. to approximately 50,000 in 1929, yet the future of this type of shipment is none too promising. E ‘The advantages of the mixed-car shipment are to be found in the lower freight rates pos- sible through the shipment of less than car- logd lots in & sing’e car at one rate, sometimes based on the rate of the highest rated article in the shipment, but, nevertheless, at a saving from the total cost of the shipment at -less than carload rates on the individual shipments, The auto truck, however, has stepped in, or, rather, rolled in, to share the business in the more densely populated séctions where road development has brought about a system of linking highways, which makes it possible to truck supplies from 100 to 200 miles. Dealers in the smalier towns and cities, where facilities make the truck shipment eco- nomical, seem to prefer to truck from a dis- tance rather than to receive supplies in mixed carload lots. They find several advantages in _THE. SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. |C, DECEMBER 7, 19%0. WHICH? Lovc or Career? By Fannie Hurst. . A New Story From the Pen of the Highest Paid Short-Story Writer, Thomas was not one to bicker. He and Emanie were young. IFE in a Middle West city, as the wife of a young salesman for an automobile firm, was not the glamorous picture Emanie had drawn for herself on those occasions when she let her mind reach into the future beyond her smug present. And that salesman one who had certain reactionary views that were rather frightening. Ign the abstract it could scarcely be said that the opportunity to marry Thomas Maugham was the rosy ome that should have attracted her response, except for one great factor. Emanie was in love with Thomas. He was the sort of man she could visualize with thrill, as the husband of her household, the father of her children, the dear close confidant of every aspect of her life. He had qualities that in a man were precious to her. Vigor, gen- tleness, intelligence and a charming laissez faire. ‘This last, she told herself, his eu{ i capacity to let tomorrow take care o ‘n(:enlg,mvhntvngolngwshndlnhh way of an ultimate big material success in life. But, just the same, it kept him sweet and unshrewd and gentle in the way that was so appealing to her. For v.h!!neg months Emanie dallied with the idea of marrying Thomas, torn beiween the conflicting elements of what' was undoubted attraction; her practical knowledge of his shortcomings; her dread of ‘the monotony of what a routine life would mean, and her hov- ering sense of the folly of throwing away her freedom and economic independence. In the end her judgment, and what she called her common sense, and her distaste for the sordidness of the routine of comparative poverty, stacked up against what she called her schoolgirl romanticism, and one morning, in the Middle West city, Thomas received the and Trucks. this. For one thing, the produce market is probably the most sensitive in the world, re- acting violently from day to day, under vary- ing weather conditions, market congestion and early arrival of supplies. A dealer buying in mixed carloads may find that at the time of arrival of the carload the price has dropped drastically from that at which ‘he purchased In that case there is little that he can do but grin and bear it. Buying from a wholesaler,’ however, he is in a position to take advantage of every drop in price that may offer when an oversupply, warm weather and other factors ruinous to fresh produce knocks the botiom out. Then, too, the use of a central market as « base of supplies usually offers a far greater variety of vegetables and fruit than a dealer would feel safe in purchasing on the mixed- car basis. The rapidity with which perishable supplies are handled at the freight terminals permits the loading of trucks and their travel to the smaller towns with such speed that they may arrive at the local markets for sale to the housewife at about the same time that they would had they been handled by direct mixed- car shipment, The dealer at the general terminal is almost certain to have a dependable and varied as- sortment of produce on hand, and the prices, of course, being based upon competitive deal- ers’ prices, are bound to be as low as condi- tions warrant. It is the removal of uncertainty along these lines which has taken the small city dealers in the more densely populated areas to the general centers, even 20 miles away, rather than to the system of mixed-car ship- ments. letter which permanently severed their pro- visional engagement. Afterward, as Emanie told herself, she realized 10 what extent she had hovered on the edge of folly. Oncé the letter had been written dismissing Thomas, it seemed to her that all her good judgment, released from bondage, came flowing to hedge her further from the folly of what she had contemplated. Once that letter was written and mailed i8 seemed incredible to Emanie that she had ever even hovered on the edge of indecision. THR!:E months later ‘her salary was ine creased 33'%; per cent and at the end of two years her photograph had appeared in a popular magazine as one of the ten highest- salaried women in the country. She has a three-story house now, on one of the smart East Side streets of the city, which she sharss with a woman friend who is almost equally successful in another field of endeavor. Their joint Sunday evening at homes are among the most popular in an excinsive and sophisticated set of professional anc” “ocial men and women, At 40 Emanie is chic, worldly wise, traveled, successful and filled with the divers interests of a demanding and complex business life, a busy social whirl, good clothes, good food and even better busie ness prospects. She and her woman friend, however, plan to retire one of these days and take a hunting trip into East Africa that will consume several years. Every so often, on one of her business trips across country, Emanie has occasion to stop in Tom Maugham's city and she never fails to look him up. Thomas has married, is earn- about $60 a week and, with his wife and two children, occupies a bungalow in a row of similar ones, on a pre'ty suburban street. Elleen Maugham is 40, a little fat, blond, and has two tall, gangling sons, one in hers and one in Thomas’ image. Their lives apparently are as routinized as the row of bungalows in which they live, except for the fact that Elleen does not sece it that way, and Thomas does not and the universe about the unit of four in that small house on the small street :et busy' :hn: hap;;y and crammed with the \y an: es an of - s ; Jjoys a humdrum ex There is no doubt, of course, that nof :l‘le instant would Emanie change places twtthm een. On the other hand, there is even less doubt that Eileen could contemplate anything so calamitous as hav: to ¢ 3 . ing hange places with (Copyright, 1930.) Leather Market Neglectea'. l;iOGLOVAKIA,‘ which is an up and coming manufacturing nation, offe: - ket for American leather which has be:::‘ll:::t neglected by American tanners, Julius Schnite zer, trade expert of the Department of Come merce, who has bzen carrying on an investiga- tion into the leather market, has found that Czechoslovakia imports about 6,000,000 pounds of leather ‘annually, only 5 per cent of which eol;:‘s from this country. ng one of the principal sources in Europe, Czechoslovakia is in need :2 mlu'ge quantities of leather. The country has about 300 tanneries of its own, employing about 15,000 men. This tanning industry turns out about 50,000,000 pounds of leather a year. It is believed that tanners could open up an important market in Czechoslovakia if efforts were made to keep ample stocks of the desired kinds cf leather on hand and pro- vide for prompt delivery of orders. . WWooden Toy Output Big. Tl-m Christmas stockings this year are likely to have more wcoden toys. than in previous years, judging from the figures on wooden toys turned out. The increase over 1927 exceeded 100 per cent, the total being $2,793,000. The aggregate of the various turned and otherwise shaped wooden articles in common trade such as clothes pins, handles, bowls, clothes racks, toothpicks, ironing boards, pastry boards and washboards runs into important figures. The $57.119,000 value of the 1927 cut- put grew during last year by 9 per cent to $62,- 249,000. There were 836 fictories so engaged and they employed 19,288 workers, an increase of 20 per cent over 1927. Michigan Farms Fewer. ONLY three out of eighty-four counties in Michigan could boast of holding their own in the matter of farms during the past five years, These three, Dickinson, Iron and Os- coda, showed increase, but all the others re- ported a decided drop, Oakland County falling off most, with a drop of 40 per cent, The State as a whole was off 13 per cent, with & dro of 22,4132,