Starting From Scratch
By her own inner clock, she was running late.
By everyone else's method of timekeeping, she was ahead of schedule. But Elisha Jane Reed had gotten to her present position of senior editor in the exclusive publishing firm of Randolph & Sons by following, to a good extent, Henry David Thoreau's advice about marching to a different drummer. She marched to that drummer, in double time, so that she could elude his other equally famous phrase, the one about most men leading lives of quiet desperation.
Because the line applied equally, perhaps even more truthfully, to women, as well.
Desperation, as contemplated by the late nonconformist, came to her only in the wee hours of the night, when everything bad was magnified by the shadows in the room and everything good was obscured behind the dust motes. It was then that she took stock of her life, measuring it by the oldfashioned standards that refused to die even in this day and age. The standards that had been laid down for all women since Eve had opted for a more extensive wardrobe than just her long hair and a random fig leaf. Namely, a husband and tiny miniature copies or combinations ... read full excerpt from Starting from Scratch ebook
