Dunstan's and at Petersham--(I am
glad she gave a Hundred pounds each to _them_); and to the
French, Belgian, Russian, Italian, Serbian, Portuguese and Japanese
Flag Days and to Our Own Day; besides enriching a number of
semi-fraudulent war charities which had alluring titles.
But if, from paying handsomely to all these praise-worthy endeavours
to mitigate the horrors of war, she proceeded to render personal
service, she became the despair of the paid organizers and
business-like workers. She couldn't add and she couldn't subtract or
divide with any certainty of a correct result; she couldn't spell
the more difficult words or remember the right letters to put after
distinguished persons' names when she addressed envelopes in her
large, childish handwriting; she couldn't be trusted to make
enquiries or to detect fraudulent appeals. She lost receipts and
never grasped the importance of vouchers; she forgot to fill up
counterfoils, or if reminded filled them up "from memory" so that
they didn't tally; she signed her name, if there was any choice of
blank spaces, in quite the wrong place.
So, invariably, tactful secretaries or assistant secretaries were
told off to explain to her--ever so nicely--that "she was no
business woman" (this, to the daughter of wholesale manufacturers,
sounded rather flattering), and that though she was invaluable as a
"name," as a patroness, or one of eighteen Vice Presidents, she was
of no use whatever as a worker.
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