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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 10, Issue 8 (November 1, 1935)

One Job At A Time?

One Job At A Time?

“I really can't do more than one job at a time, so I stick to that.” She was a girl student at one of our University Colleges, and, while visiting a friend of mine one Sunday afternoon, some-one had asked her why she had let her music drop. It seems that in her early teens she had been a promising pianist, but now she refused herself time to practise. She left soon after tea, saying that she had a book to finish before lectures in the morning. We were used to that, knowing undergrads. But this serious young damsel also turned down a bathing and tennis party for the following Saturday as she usually swotted for so many hours on a Saturday.

“It's no use asking Eileen,” someone else remarked. “She's always snowed under with swot.”

This happened early last April. I could have understood it this month or last, with examinations looming, but not in April, that delightful early month when most undergrads shun the studious precincts of the Library, save when a merciless Professor ordains that at least a minimum of research be undertaken and the results ably set forth in a “paper.”

I have met Eileen several times since then—a very nice girl, and doing well at her studies, I believe. Nothing outstanding, but a real plodder, who will collect her letters in due course.But the girl vaguely annoys me. I would like to jolt her out of her rut and make her take a little interest in the world around her. I know why, before she took up 'Varsity work, she showed promise at the piano. It was because she felt, even then, that she page 58 could do only one job at a time—and music was it. Probably when, and if, she marries, she will devote herself entirely to the one job of housekeeping and become (though I do not mean to be unkind) even more boring.

The young things I like to have about me are those who are willing to divide their interests. They work with zest and manage to sandwich in all the play they can. In the interplay of interests and social relationships they develop their sense of fun, lose their feeling of self-importance, broaden their outlook, widen their sympathies, become “all-round” people. And they are the girls who are going to develop into the type of older woman I so much admire—capable in many directions, friendly, sympathetic but bracing, au fait with the world.

I am sorry for Eileen, who will go on deepening her rut, with satisfaction to herself, not realizing what she is missing, unless some cataclysm jolts her into the sunlight again.

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