Maybe because of my heavy, joyless demeanor, she didn’t argue very much about my choice of everyday clothes. The salesladies reassured her and supported my choices, which obviously helped. I built my new wardrobe with the purpose being that I’d have something new and fresh to wear every workday. I bought new shoes and a fancy new hat to wear to and from work as well. The following week, my father surprised me at dinner with a new watch. It was a Waltham jeweled pocket watch in a gold case. My mother was far more stunned at the sight of it than I was. Watches weren’t exactly at the top of my wish list.

“Harrington, what was the cost of such a thing?”

“The cost is a business investment, Rosemary. When Corrine takes out her timepiece to tell a customer the time, I want him to be impressed even more with the quality of our employees. Take good care of it, Corrine,” he said, pushing it toward me. “Mark the time. In two days, you’ll be opening the bank with me at nine a.m.”

“Thank you, Daddy,” I said, but not with the enthusiasm my mother wanted to see.

She grimaced, grunted, and rose from the table. “I do hope all this investment in clothes, shoes, and now an expensive watch has the results we expect,” she muttered.

“I’m sure it all will,” my father said, smiling at me.

I smiled back, but he would have had to be an oaf not to see how empty it was.

Despite what my mother had thought and how I had behaved toward the idea, I wasn’t at all afraid of working at the bank. From the way my father had described my duties and reinforced that description in the morning on the way in, I saw myself as nothing more than window dressing. If my father wasn’t the president of the bank and a potential candidate for board chairman, this position for me surely wouldn’t exist. Actually, as we rode into Alexandria and I sat back in my new clothes with my new and very fashionable small blue bonnet, I grew more excited about my being the prettiest female in the bank. My father said I would sit at a desk quite prominent to anyone entering.

Even those men who had no need to speak to me would find a way to do so, I thought. It would be difficult, but I would try very hard to be modest and sound as if I had been working in banks and similar institutions for years.

Every female employee stopped what she was doing to look at me when we entered. My father’s secretary, one of my mother’s widowed friends, Mrs. Emma Stone, rushed to greet us, pouring her saccharine welcome over me with embarrassing exaggeration.