Emmie smiled ruefully at her. “If there were a recital competition, I’m sure we’d be tops.”
“Well, I don’t think we’re useless,” said Maud. “I could be jolly well useful doing something that made any sense. The YMCA director says there’s plenty of canteen work and loads that needs doing for the troops. And it has the benefit of not being in the firing line!”
“I wonder if she has any books on how to drive a Ford?” asked Liza as she followed her friend out of the saloon.
“It’s going to be a disaster, isn’t it?” said Kate.
Emmie tried to remember the way she had felt at the luncheon back in the spring, the luncheon where Mrs. Rutherford had first broached the notion of a Smith College Relief Unit; the way she had felt just a week ago when they had first been gathered together in this same saloon, the exultation, the certainty.
All her life, she had watched as her mother launched one grand scheme after another. Her mother was a born leader. Mrs. Livingston Van Alden was a founding member of the French Union for Women’s Suffrage, despite the small impediment of not being French. But she hadn’t let that stop her any more than she had let not being British stop her from chaining herself to the railings of Parliament with her great friend Emmeline Pankhurst. She had convinced Alva Vanderbilt to resume speaking to Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish for long enough to invite her to a suffrage conference at Marble House; she had given speeches and organized rallies all around the world, all while giving birth to seven children and seeing them raised along progressive educational lines.
Admittedly, this had been administered, in practice, by a series of nannies and governesses, but the theory of it had all come directly from Emmie’s mother, who had mandated cold baths and Latin verbs with equal enthusiasm.
Emmie had been given the sort of education of which her mother had only dreamed—but she was not, her teachers said regretfully, academic by nature. Except when it came to poetry. She did like poetry. But Keats and Lord Tennyson weren’t on her mother’s list of Useful and Improving Topics. Emmie was meant to be studying the classics and absorbing rhetoric, but she found Greek verbs impenetrable, and every time she got up on a podium, her tongue faltered （although she was rather good at draping bunting）。
She was meant to be out there, rallying and marching, carrying the flag, motivating and inspiring, the very image of the New Woman. Well, her mother’s image of the New Woman.
Instead, she had spent the last six years doing settlement house work, warming milk for babies, teaching children their ABCs, making sure the children of the Lower East Side had warm clothes for winter and that the library of the Girls’ Club （for respectable young working women of the less-fortunate classes） was stocked with the sorts of books that might appeal to a twelve-year-old who had been put to work sewing shirtwaists at the age of eight.
Emmie wouldn’t miss the chaos of the family brownstone on Thirty-Fourth Street—well, not much. But she did miss her girls. Some of them came to her so young—so young and so thin! And it was such joy to feed them up and teach them their letters if they didn’t know them already and just give them a quiet, warm place where they could be. There weren’t many places where one could just be.
It was all very useful work, and Emmie knew—at least, she told herself—that it truly did make a difference to the recipients, but nothing to light up the world. Nothing to earn her mother’s respect.
But here, here finally, was her chance to do something heroic.
If only it didn’t all go wrong.
“It’s this ship,” Emmie said, desperately needing Kate to feel as she did, to believe as she did, because if Kate didn’t believe, how were they to succeed? It was Kate who had got her through Smith, had kept her from failing her examinations. “It’s the waiting that’s so hard, being here and not being able to do anything yet.”
“Yes, but what are we meant to do?” Kate asked practically. “Other than collect cows.”
Offer hope to the hopeless, Emmie wanted to say, but somehow the words rolled off better from Mrs. Rutherford’s tongue than hers.
“At least we have professional assurance that we’re not neurasthenics!” When Kate looked at her skeptically, she added, “I’m sure it will all make sense once we get there. Everything will be better once we get to Paris.”
Chapter Three
The Unit had an excellent time on the voyage. We had never all met until we embarked, but already we like and admire each other . . .