Burn This Letter- A Tribute to Mothers on Mother’s Day

Probably from September 1917..Marion Blair and kids

I have decided where to start Biology and Ambition the story of Marion Blair in the 1910 era, the follow up toThreshold Girl about sister Flora and Diary of a Confirmed Spinster about sister Edith (all part of a big volume called School Marms and Suffragettes.)

I will start it with this war time letter from her husband. 

He is home in Montreal  being watched over by his sister in laws, Flo and Edith. He is not happy.Marion is with her mother in Richmond with her babies very likely. Flora is a teacher, so not at work and Edith is at this time, I believe, working for Sun Life Insurance. And there’s a lot of war work, volunteering.

I’m guessing Marion, with two young kids, is in no rush to get home to Westmount.  I have other era letters than say the house gets hot…and there’s fresh veggies and butter at Richmond. In another earlier letter Marion is telling her mother about all the local gardens cropping up in Westmount and she sort of mocks the city folk, who she suggests have no idea what they are doing.

It’s getting towards the end of the war her. In two months Edith and Marion will be visiting their friends the Tuckers in Montreal who learn they have lost their son Percy. Then they learn he is alive. Then they learn he is dead. I don’t think they felt sorry for Hugh. Married men didn’t have to go to war in Canada. Hugh would be about 40 anyway.

July 26, 1918

Hugh to Marion

My dearest sweetheart,

I cannot express in writing how pleased I was to hear your voice over the telephone a little while ago and was very sorry when I learned that due to the circumstances, you were not able to come home…Dearest, I have never written you on this strain since I have known you and before I say what I have in mind, I beg of you to please try and understand it in the light that I mean it.

For Marion, dear, I love you with all my heart and it is because of my affection for you that I try to pave the way a little. I honestly, would not intentionally hurt you Marion. 

Now sweetest, here it is: You know, Dear, that you have left me alone at different times for indefinite periods, but may I say that I have never yet found one month to be as long as this one. 

Really, it has seemed to me almost like years. I would a thousand times rather be left entirely alone than to be left again with the girls, as I cannot get them to do anything which appears to me to be reasonable.

 I have come home on several occasions and the front and back doors were not locked. They will not close the windows and the house is almost like an oven. They forget to order food. The refrigerator is left open; the ice is melting as fast as you can put it in. 

Cawlice. (French swear word, euphemism for chalice)

Water is running all over the floor and things are lying about. I am sick and tired of the whole place.

 Take pity on me Darling before I go crazy and come home to me to look after and love me. *but under no circumstances take chances (with mother’s health). 

 Take it from me, God help the poor man that gets either one of them, if they don’t change. You can do more in five minutes than they can do together in a day. You have forgotten more than they’ll ever know. 

God bless you Marion and may it be God’s will that he can spare you to me for many long happy years.

Lovingly,
Hughie,

PS. Don’t fail to burn this when finished reading.

Pork and Berries and Opium!

Direct mail advertisement Crisco 1916.

Well, back in 2003, the first item I pulled from the old Victorian trunk that contained The Nicholson Family Letters was this Direct Mail Ad, from 1916, addressed to Mrs. N. Nicholson.

Lucky I did, because it piqued my curiosity. I could see it was an interesting item, pretending to be a friendly letter from the neighbourhood grocery, but really part of a slick  advertising campaign. Lots of North American women got this very ad, I’m sure. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps.

It came out of Chicago.

I did some research and decided it was likely an early campaign of female advertising legend Helen Landsdowne Resor of J. Walter Thompson. Apparently her signature style was to appeal directly to the homemaker with a three paneled brochure with a coupon. This Crisco ad fit the bill.

But today I read the small print that said Copyright J T N Mitchell Chicago. Another advertising man.

It is possible that Resor did this, before she was hired by J. Walter Thompson. She would have been a Landsdowne then.

Her Wikipedia entry says that the New York Daily News did a profile of her, as a top  advertiser, but all I can find are wedding and death notices.

Well, I’m glad I found I first. The trunk was under a shelf, so I could only open it a few inches and stick my hand in.

Yesterday, I went over the Nicholson house accounts, 1883-1921, for my book Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, the follow up to Threshold Girl. I am writing a digital trilogy about Margaret’s three daughters, all ‘new women’ of the era.

Margaret did not change over to Crisco, I have her 1917 butter bill.

What struck me this time, was that the Nicholsons ate very well, even when struggling financially. Beef, pork, chicken (a relative luxury) turkey, lamb, canned cod and salmon, fresh fish earlier on. Lots of Haddie (haddock) a national dish. Oatmeal, oatmeal, oatmeal and I bet it tasted WAY better than the 1 minute crap we buy today. They seemed to sweeten more with molasses and honey than refined sugar. And all that opium in their sodas. Yum!

Pears, apples, bananas! (yes) and all kinds of  berries in season. Fresh veggies from the garden. And Margaret was a master baker, like so many of the Scots. (Now, their garden was not organic; they used  the Paris Green a lot. (It’s in my Threshold Girl book.)

In 1908 some local cows trampled their garden and Norman wanted to sue if the damage was over 2.00.

My gosh, everything must have tasted to good. Everything slow cooked in the wood oven.

When the girls were living in the city, they were always pleased when Mom sent in a “Care Package.” They were all becoming de-skilled. Their own daughters would feed their kids on canned garbage in the sixties.

I once heard Jamie Oliver say, on the BBC, that the middle class, today, never had it so good, with respect to food. (And the poor are worse off.) He’s wrong with respect to the middle class in towns at the turn of the last century. They may not have had the selection of foods, like we have today,  but the quality was amazing no doubt. And they knew what to do with it.

The back of Tighsolas in Richmond, Quebec, where the garden would have been.

Cleanliness is an Attitude

Attitude Floor and Wood cleaner.

I just found a product I’ve been looking for. Something to polish wood that isn’t toxic. Lately, I inherited some antique furniture but I am loathe to clean it, as I do not like furniture polishes.

Now, admittedly, my job as a child was to polish the furniture, using Pledge (oil and aerosol) and also to clean the bathtub, using Old Dutch Powder. All this crap going into my young lungs,mixing with the ubiquitous clouds of second hand smoke.

But parents didn’t worry about such things back then. They didn’t worry much. It was good times, stable times for the middle class, give or take a Cuban Missile Crisis or two.

I guess the threat of nuclear war looming over the planet made every other worry pale in comparison.

Well, the prosperity helped, too.

Pledge, Old Dutch, DDT and all the sweet smelling lead emanating fromm the tail pipes of those bright pink TBirds with the big fancy tailfins.

And the 60′s air pollution in the city. Legend. Any person who lived in the suburbs or country knew that  visit to the city meant smelly hair and even smokey underwear.

OK. All that and I’ve had only one serious lung disease, pneumonia, when my own kids were about 10, caused by being run down and by being prescribed too many anti-biotics for little things like sore throat and then this mighty bug swept through our household and I didn’t have the resistance to fight it.

Anyway, if the 60′s were bad, the crap in our food has only gotten worse. So I do buy organic veggies when I can and ‘artisanal’ meats like chicken, which, our course actually have texture and taste.

But the other day I had to laugh or cry. I was visiting my sister in law, in her beautiful home with the cathedral windows and she found ants in the kitchen and began spraying all over with Raid.

I turned to my husband and said, “There go all the benefits from eating organic for the past 10 years.”

The woman, a product of the 50′s, is intrepid when it comes to dirt and bugs and such. The stronger the cleaner the better.

And I only use these Attitude Products. Which are fine. For cleanliness. For that 50′s pristine look, well go elsewhere.

Now, my story Threshold Girl at www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf is about the 1910 era, the era of Pure Soap, Pure Water and Pure Women.

The Soap-Industrial Complex got a toehold in that era. In large part because dirty homes (and the mostly immigrant women who kept them) were being blamed for all the problems of industrialization. All the bodily illnesses and all the ‘moral’ ones too.

The adage “Cleanliness is next to Godliness” was not a mere metaphor,back then, it was to be taken LITERALLY. And it gave the moral high ground automatically to the elite and upper middle class who could afford servants. And it kept other middle class women from getting ‘restless woman syndrome’ and picking up a placard to protest their second class status.

And this ideology filtered down through the century, reaching a kind of apex in the 1950′s, for it was used to drive women back into the home after the war.

And these cleaning product companies, that promoted PURITY above all, because GIANTS over the century and now many of them make anti-cancer and asthma drugs too. And pesticides too. Kind of weird, I’d say. Kind of weird, but good for business and as well all now know WHATEVER IS GOOD FOR BUSINESS IS “GOOD.”

The Servant Problem – In Black and White

Hmm.

Right now, I am performing the second edit of the May 27 1911-December 18 1911 Nicholson Family Letters, which will likely be volume 1.

It’s a trick, deciding how to annotate these letters so that the ‘story of the Laurier Era’ unfolds in understandable fashion.

But I’m having fun.

And thanks to the Census of 1901 and 1911 online, I’m getting a clearer picture of THIS SERVANT PROBLEM, which is key to the story of Canadian women in the era….

In 1911, as I have written, only 2 families in the Tighsolas neighbourhood have domestics, or servants, or maids. Live in ones anyway.

In the 1901 era, almost all families have a live in maid, including the Nicholsons, who have a 58 year old maid called Maggie Mclean (yet another relation) but this CAN’T POSSIBLY be the same Maggie Mclean who died in 1907, and left the Nicholsons out of her will. She was wealthy. (Still, I have to check… I’m sure I have her age on the WILL that I have.)

So by the 2nd letter only, I am annotating a great deal about servants. Readers might wonder why this is so important. But then Flora goes to Macdonald, which is a school founded to teach science to farmers and domestic science to women… so that the middle class girls can become better housewives and so that lower class girls can become better domestics.

The Powers that Be In Canada were all for poor girls getting work as domestics, which they described as honorable work, as opposed to, say, factory work. (The Montreal Council of Women did not agree. They thought women should also get technical training in the trades, which would give unmarried women independence.)

But really, they were trying to fix that irksome servant problem for themselves and their posh friends.

The Working Class Connection

Dominon Textile Employees (St. Henri) (biblotheque virtuel)

Well, I received Angels of the Workplace and Working Families today, two days after I ordered them. Someone had thrown the package on the lawn…? Anyway, I read the beginning of Angels in the Workplace, about Female Canadian Garment workers and it’s important material, with respect to Flo in the City.

Best of all, Mercedes Steedman, author of Angels confirms what I have been saying. That there were, in essence, only a few professions open to (most) women in 1910 (and before 1910 and after 1910) Ghettos. In 1891 Canada, women were by rank: servants, dressmakers, teachers; in 1941, they were stenographer or typist, maid, teacher, tailoress or related work. Hmm.

She also confirms what I have inferred from the Nicholson family letters about the middle class and clothing. They bought men’s clothes first, then women’s coats and suits and were slow to buy dresses and shirtwaists and blouses, because they could make these items at home.

Now I know for sure that Dominion Textile will figure large in my story, as that company had a Magog Plant and St Henri Plant. No doubt some of Marion’s students went to work there – and it is very likely some of the students’ parents worked there. Her school was near St. Henri.

And it allows me to explore the Jewish Question too. I read in Mariana Valverde’s book that it was the Presbyterians who were key in pushing through the Lord’s Day Act in 1906 – and that the Toronto Presbyterians, at least, had no sympathy for the Jews whose sabbath was on Saturday. And, in 1909, a Presbyterian Minister on the Montreal School Board didn’t want Jewish people on the Board, calling them heathens and thieves. I’m sure sure what the make up of Royal Arthur was demographically, but Willian Lunn, where Flora taught in 1912 closed down for Jewish Holidays.

These books I mentioned are in the Canadian Social History Series. Funny, social history is often thought of as working class history. Then there’s regular history, of the elite.. but where does the middle class stand? It’s social history, too.

It’s easy to figure out how the middle class lived and thought in the era, because mainstream magazines catered to them… but what’s in magazines doesn’t reflect the reality of their lives, just an ideal or perception. ..Letters do reflect the reality.. but, I was once told (by a expert in the Canadian family) that letters belonging to the middle class are rare. Lucky, I have 1,000 of them. 300 from the 1908-1913 era.

I’m reading about the working class in 1910 Canada for my book about the middle class in 1910 Canada, because, as I said before, the middle class only exits in relation to the working class or upper class. They fear falling into the working class or worse and they aspire to be upper class, with some reservations. Consquently, they are racked with anxiety, especially in hard times. The Nicholsons were exactly this way: nervous wrecks. Stoical nervous wrecks, but all the same. And their struggle to survive in the 1910 era hopefully will lead readers (of my book) to ask, What does it mean to be middle class? What does it mean to be Canadian?

Preserving Women’s Purity

A Roll in the Hay.. Flo and someone and friends.

I am reading The Age of Light, Soap and Water by Mariana Valverde, 1991, which encompasses many of the http://www.tighsolas.ca/ and Flo in the City themes. (I learned that the 1906 Lord’s Day Act, which I mention in Flo in the City, was pushed through by Radical Presbyterians. Interesting.)

And, as I blogged earlier, I have figured out a lot of what Valverde writes for myself, using the materials now available online.

I also ordered two other books in this Canadian Social History Series: Angels in the Workplace about Women in the Canadian Garment Industry and Working Families, Age Gender and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal, which I tried to find five years ago at the Atwater Library, but had no luck.

Light, Soap and Water is Toronto-centric, being about “ANGLO-Canada” – and it’s theory-based, but there are some parts which relate directly to some of the Nicholson experiences.

For instance, Valverde describes the YWCA. Marion roomed at the Y in 1905, when at McGill Normal School and hated it. TOO MANY RULES. Well, Valverde mentions that the Y’s mission was to keep good girls pure. The roomers were ‘subject to a thorough system of surveillance.’

Edith complains in a letter that she wishes she could go to a ‘lecture’ but she has no one to go with. She must stay in her room alone. According to Valverde, a woman walking alone at night could be stopped by police and she would have “to give a good account of herself.”

Women really couldn’t go out alone at night!!

If prostitution, the so called social evil didn’t exist, they would have had to invent it, in order to CONTROL WOMEN.

In NY it was illegal for a woman to eat alone, at any time, and women’s groups wanted that changed in light of the new realities. (I’m not sure about Montreal but I’m guessing laws were similar. When Marion is searching for a room, she hears of one available, but she must get her meals out and Margaret doesn’t like that idea. I think I saw an ad in the Gazette for a woman only restaurant.) And it was illegal is many (most!) jurisdictions for women to wear pants. The new harem skirt fashion in the 1910 era confused people. (We call them harem pants today.) A daring beauty wore a pair right out in the open, on the Brooklyn Bridge and stopped traffic.

Feminists were often racist, because this “Purity Movement” was a mishmash of objectives and metaphors, involving fear of the city (with its prostitution) an essentially anti-female sentiment; fear of racial impurity or race suicide, which was a fear of immigrants; fear of intemperance (an essentially anti-male sentiment), etc. But Marion goes to see the graduation of the first ever Chinese graduate from McGill and writes about it. The Chinese were singled out as the most likely to lure women into white slavery. No wonder the community has never been comfortable in Montreal.

And when Marion and Flora and two others find their own place to live in 1912-1913, where they entertain their beaus, well, I knew this was unconventional, even daring, but I never realized how daring.

And you know, in the letters of the era, Margaret, the Mom does not seem upset about this arrangement, and she worries about just about everything else. In fact, she enjoys visiting the girls that year. Indeed, her main concern is that Marion will ‘run the show’ which probably happened, as Marion was a take charge kind of girl.

Pink Collar Work in a White Dress World

The Stenographer 1910 Edison Film

In the 20th century, we had the pink collar ghetto of the female office worker.

When I applied upon graduation at an advertising agency in Montreal, I was told I would have to work 2 years first as a receptionist, then two years as a typist before getting any chance to write copy.

I wondered what the male graduate had to do to enter the field. Luckily, I could not type well.

I have a letter in the Nicholson stash from 1902, from a woman working in an office in Montreal. It is Christmas and she is busy doing commissions for people back home in Richmond: She describes her life, in general, as otherwise monotonous. She works in an office, gets home at six every day, eats a crappy hash made by the rooming house matron, and then dresses for an evening out that is also predictable and boring.

According to one 1912 article, New York Post, there were 100,000 thousand woman working as stenographers (which meant office workers) in New York City alone in 1912 (Doesn’t seem right.)

80-85 percent of all commercial typewriting in the country (up to 250,000 typists) was being performed by women.

Edith Nicholson, of my story Flo in the City, didn’t have a teaching diploma, so she went to secretarial school in Boston and ended up working for Sun Life Insurance during the war, and later for the Registrar at McGill, a most interesting job, I am sure. She was the Assistant Registrar.

Here’s some more of the Post article.

“Although a machine for the impressing or transcribing letters progressively or singly was patented in England in 1714, it was not until 1874 that the working typeriter was put on the market, and its story as important economic factor has been packed in the last 30 years. Women have been in offices before the evolution of the typewriter, but they fairly poured in afterward. It is questionable if the women themselves have yet even recognized how wide is the door into the business world which the little bell on the typewriter may be said to have opened for them. (sic).

But women lack vision when it comes to business, or they aren’t ambitious..

“Some people read in it the salvation of the nation:and jubilate that the marrying instinct is so strong in women that it can be relied on to survive all phases of industrial readjustment. Others wring their hands over the waste of materials and opportunity involved in the girls’ attitude of indifference.”

(Examples are given of what some women have done with the opportunity. One woman at one company became an office manager! And one woman rose to be confidential secretary of a financier at a salary of 10,o00 a year. (HUGE Salary!)

(In 1912, in Montreal, it was said that a stenographer could make 1ooo dollars a year, which was very very good pay. The census shows them making between 400 and 700, the same salary as a teacher with diploma.)

The article then describes the male typists who like the competitive aspects, the speed tests! It’s their ‘racing instinct’.

“Never has women had a fairer field, a wider prospect (than with office work).
She still had difficulties before her, prejudices to overcome, like equal pay for equal effort.”

Henry Spillman, who in interested in developing a work force out of women typists, says that success in the field is 50 percent personality, 30 percent general education and 20 percent technical. (Hmm, I guess physical beauty is part of personality.)

And You Think You Have Problems Now?

Eaton’s coats. 1913 catalogue. In the Nicholson girls’ price range..

Hmm. I decided to post a letter from the http://www.tighsolas.ca/ collection and annotate it. Look at the date. November 11, 1912. Armistice Day before there was a need for such a day. As I’ve explained in earlier installments, in 1912-13 Flora and Marion and cousin Marion Watters did a very bold thing: they moved into their own flat (with one other teacher, the daughter of an MNA.) It was hard to find a landlord who would rent to a group of girls, however respectable the would be tenants, however pristine their references, because of that ‘keeping a bawdy house’ business, an issue that is more than ever in the news today. Still controversial. But Marion Nicolson was one determined woman.

2401 Hutchison

November 11, 1912

Dear Norman,

You see by the heading that I am still in the city. Your letter did not reach me until Friday pm, as Edith sent it–so I felt a little worried as I always got them Thursday. I am so sorry about your coat. I gave the right add (address)to Lann McMorine. You better make some enquiries there about it. Might be at Cochran.(Margaret is worried for her husband out on the railroad, as usual. He moved from Cochrane to Hearst in Northern Ontario.) Edith said she told them it had not reached you. I am sure you will feel the cold without it and your flannels too. Marion and Flora won’t hear to me going home and E writes for me to stay as she is getting on all right – has one of the Pepplers (cousins living across the street) when she stays in the house. I will not stay more than another week. (It was impossible in those days for a group of working girls to run a home. You needed someone to cook at least and to wash up.) I do wish Edith was here and that we could be together for the winter as they ought to have someone here. Edith writes that Mr. Dyson said he bought thirty cords of wood and would supply our winter’s wood and would bring a cord any time and to let him know so don’t worry any more about wood. (Norman worried about his family keeping warm in Richmond.)She also sent me notice that taxes were due. (Hmm. Yesterday, I was in Richmond and saw that the car dealership was Dyson-Armstrong. A Peppler girl would marry an Armstrong.)

Now I am very sorry that Herb seems to be so careless, debt seems to be no worry to him. (Son Herbert was causing the family all kinds of problems in 1912. He was out West.) I hope you have just let him know how hard it is for you to be away from your family and that he might try and do better. He has not written me for several weeks . I really cannot understand how he can do it. Well, the weeks are going by and Xmas will soon be here I don’t know what the girls can do with the flat; or if they will be able to get someone to keep fires if they want to go home. They will have two weeks holidays. They were talking it over but said they would decide when you came. The weather has been quite nice since I came in here. I have not bought a coat. Takes more than I had. Marion got a long navy blue one that will be very comfortable this winter. Paid 16.50 and Flora got a brown the same price. They really needed them. (The pics above are from the Eaton’s catalogue for the next year. The first pages of the fall/winter catalogue feature Persian lamb coats, costing over 300. dollars! Marion makes a good salary of 600 a year.)I have not gone anywhere not been up to Cleveland’s yet. I have been having trouble with my teeth and as Marion was having work done at Cleveland’s Friday, I had him look at mine. (Dr. Cleveland is a Montreal dentist and likely related to the Nicholsons by marriage. The Clevelands are a founding family in Shipton County Quebec. Yesterday, I noticed a Cleveland is still a notary in Richmond, as is a Rowatt. Herb was in debt to to a notary named Rowatt back in 1910.) He said he would do an hours work for me Monday so I am to go at three o’clock, Too bad yours are giving you trouble. I think it is caused from cold, my front teeth at least one of them felt loose, but he said he did not think it was but found cavities in others. M. had five filled. Did I tell you that the Adams are moving in across where Dr. Astna was. This week E said the Haggarts were having a sale on the 16. Aunt Han has rented her house to a GTR man.

Marion said she was going to write you and tell you about Mr. Hugh Blair. (My husband’s grandfather.)He seems very nice. Went home Saturday to Three Rivers. (The CBC had a documentary about The Blairs of Quebec, anglos in the city. Hugh’s mom was French Canadian. His grandmother was Cree.)There are a good many things that he can do such as fixing window blinds, but Marion won’t let me ask him much. (Marion was fiercely independent, but she would be married to Blair in twelve month’s time.)We are trying to put the double windows on here. I want to see them on before I go, although so far they are not needed. I don’t think there is any danger of them getting behind: the four girls pay 25 dollars each. (That’s per month.)They would rather do it than board. They say it amounted to about that at Mrs. Ellis’s. (Where the girls sometimes boarded. Marion hated the way Mrs. Ellis “lorded it over her.” Again, its all abour preserving young women’s virtue.)Now don’t worry about Herb. We cannot help it now. If the work stops there you must just take a trip out west. See why he does not at least keep himself. He must know that Marion paid Aunt Han’s note. (Marion helped her family out financially in a big way.)He never wrote her or mentioned it to me. (Herb took no responsiblity for his actions.) Write when you get this and add to Richmond. They say I will be here two weeks more but I don’t like to leave Edith alone. (Edith has quit her Montreal teaching job in the spring. She would be in Montreal in May and attend the Canadian Council of Women’s Suffrage Night and hear Mrs. Snowdon, of England, speak. ) She said she would go to Kingsbury for a visit but she thought it was too cold and just stayed at home.

Your loving Wife
Margaret

Flora is always saying she is going to write but there is so much going on they don’t have time and when I write often they think I tell all. M>

PONDERING THE FUTURE 39th installment

Talking machines. Eaton’s 1909.

June 1, 1909. Victoria Day Monday. A holiday.

A sweet, breezy Monday afternoon, and Flora is once again on the porch of Tighsolas, with a notebook on her knee, studying a scene from Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, for a classroom event she was putting on. Sometimes school could be fun. End of year exams were approaching, but this year she had managed to keep her head above water, with respect to results and, if she didn’t freeze at exam time, she would likely pass, most subjects anyway. The new teacher, Mr. Cross, continued to be more lenient than Mr. Jackson. He had even suggested she have her eyes tested – and yes, she needed glasses,for long distance viewing. She had worn the new pair, purchased in Sherbrooke, last week, all day at school.

Margaret had never asked about the Easter exam results. After her close call with tonsillitis, and a harsh winter spent shut in except for the occasional whist or bridge party, she was seldom at home. The carpets in Tighsolas had yet to be aired out. Father had come home for a week in late May, after the thaw, and had rolled and seeded the garden for Margaret, considering her still too weak after her illness. He had joined Margaret in a chorus of Why doesn’t Herb write?

Flora’s hat was still on her dresser in the bedroom. That appointed day, she had indeed got up the courage to visit Hudon’s, Poppy hat on head, only to be met by another woman, taking Eugenie’s place. Mademoiselle Hudon is in New York. “‘Ave you not read da social notes in da Richmond Times? I am here to serve you, instead.” Crestfallen, or was it relieved? Flora had beat a quick retreat.

Marion, is at her dressing table in her tiny room on Bleury. She slipped a ten dollar bill from her Friday pay into an envelope to send to her mother, but she didn’t feel like writing a long letter. What could she write about? Not last night. Yesterday, Victoria Day eve, a Sunday night of all things, she had finally made it to Dominion Park.

The crowd had been simply enormous, many many thousands of visitors. Her beau for the evening, a soft-spoken young man in his father’s tanning business, a friend of Dr. Cleveland’s, had persuaded her to ride on the train, first thing, right up front, up and down and around, and afterwards her head had been swirling.

No sooner had she found her equilibrium, he bought her a ticket to see Mini Ha Ha, a miniature female acrobat who twirled around and danced about and walked a tightrope in workaday dress. The billboard described her as ‘charming’ but Marion could have thought of better adjectives to describe the odd little female.Then there had been the fun house, the wild animal show,the infant incubator exhibit, the Southern Plantation Nightingales, with their sad, spiritual songs, the re-enactment of the San Francisco earthquake of 1905 and finally the evening’s novelty act, a swarthy Mediterrean beast of a man who battled with snakes.His oiled muscles and slate black eyes bulged huge as he fought off a nefarious nest of writhing serpents (as the cryer put it) up to his naked waist in water and Marion had been so taken by surprise by the sight of him, she had flushed ruby red, her timid escort actually had asked her if she were going to faint. But no, it was just the crush of the crowd, she pretended; 24 hours later, the feverish feeling inspired by the sight of the strongman still lingered. Or was it simmering indignation towards her new landlady, who had publicly scolded her for coming home after 11.00. For breaking house rules. How she despised being told what to do. At 25 years of age. Her brother could do just about anything he wanted and she had to be home before midnight, like a character in a silly fairy tale.

And, speak of the devil, in a flat just a few streets away,on de Bullion, Herbert Nicholson was drinking a scotch amid a rowdy group of young men, of the clerkish kind, and some ageless women of the uninhibited kind and waving a card in the air.

“This is the temperance pledge,” he said slurring. A redhead grabbed it from his hand. “I therefore promise, with the help of god to abstain from the use of all intoxicating liquids.”

Another young man walks up and asks, “Nicholson, how bout some gaming down in Chinatown.”

“No, Smithie. I’d better not. I’m supposed to be in Cowansville. My sister lives around there now. And she has all kinds of spies, chums who want to get into her good graces.”

“That didn’t stop us from going out last night to see that W.C Fields guy at the Bennett Theatre.”

“Well, I’m not going to press my luck.” The truth was, Herb had run out of money. His entire paycheque gone in two days! Lucky he had pre-purchased a ticket back to Cowansville. He’d have to put off his landlady, this month.

“Is your sister a working girl? Like us?” asks his female friend

“No, certainly not. She’s a teacher. She has a diploma. She lives in a respectable boarding house.”

The woman raises her eyebrows, menacingly, and she turned away.

She says to another woman, “Our friend ‘erb is a Christian socialist at heart. Lucky it is not his heart we want.”

“You should be nice to eem, Marie-Claude. Or e won’t get you dat job in motion pictures, with is friend Sinnott.”

“Well, don’t hold your breath, Ginette,” says Smithie, blinking hard a few times as if there is something bothering his eyes.

And in yet another downtown Montreal area home, an solid respectable four storey greystone at 72 Sherbrooke Street West, in a well-furnished but noisy third story bedroom situated above the street, Edith Nicholson sits reading Vanity Fair,by the late afternoon sun, half listening to the sharp clip clop of horse hooves on the street and the duller sound of muffled arguing below.

Mr. Crepeau, a small, dapper dignified looking man, has come home, a day late, as it were, and had a row with his fat, overbearing wife.

Somehow, crockery was broken. Her student Alice, was in her bedroom, trying on a new dress from Henry Morgan, purchased today, by the father. Baby Cecile was in the nursery, being tended by Claudille, a new girl, sent by the nuns. This was the third charity case in five months delivered to Mme. Crepeau, for rehabilition, and a little honest housework.

It wasn’t that Mrs. Crepeau was lazy. No, as a housekeeper, this stout woman with the enormous chest was as capable as Margaret Nicholson in every respect. She did all her own cooking and cleaning, despite the fact the family earned 5,000 a year.

Edith had been instructed not to talk to the new girl. Education, apparently, was the scourge of the fallen woman. Anyway, this was a girl destined to work as a domestic, once her ‘apprenticeship’ at the Crepeaus had run its course, if she could be kept away from the other. “Claudille is only 17, the same age as Flora,” she mused. But any resemblance ended there. The girl was hard and coarse, and, paradoxically, much more fragile than Flora, somehow, despite being a tall, heavy girl, and a stranger to the corset, it seemed.

Edith pulled away from Becky Sharp for a moment to ponder her immediate future. She could not wait for June 15, when she would return to Richmond, with sister Marion and spend the summer relaxing at ice cream socials and card parties and maybe attending a dance or two, if a consort could be found. If not, Aunt Bella’s Victrola and the Merry Widow Waltz would have to suffice. Edith had purchased some music cylinders to give to her niece and nephew. (She hoped they were not already bored by the device.) But after that, what would she do with herself? What could she do? If Charlie G. didn’t come to his senses.