Picture Card People

Annie Laurie

San Francisco Examiner/November 23, 1910

The picture card people have come back to town.

They’ve been away all summer—most of them—but now they’re here again all ready for the game—the game they take so much in earnest.

Who are the picture card people? 

Why, don’t you know? They’re the “workers,” the “earnest workers” who are so busy telling other people how to run their affairs that they never have any affairs of their own to run at all. There is a man in the pack once in a while, but most of the picture cards are women.

I met the Queen of Clubs the other day, and just as I met her we saw the Queen of Diamonds coming down the street. I was asking the Queen of Clubs about her mother—the mother is delicate and a little lonely, and she misses the Queen of Clubs dreadfully—and I was in hopes that the Queen of Clubs was going to stay at home with mother this winter; but, dear me, she’s never thought of such a thing. Her work is calling her, her earnest work.

The Queen of Diamonds was glad to see us—that is, she was glad to see the Queen of Clubs. She used to be rather fond of me, I think, before she became an earnest worker, but now she looks upon me as a frivolous butterfly because I never have time to go down into the slums and tell the laundress how to iron her clothes and the scrubwoman how to bring up her family. 

All I can do is my best to bring up my own family and help the laundress and the scrubwoman out once in a while with a dollar or so extra. So the Queen of Diamonds hasn’t much use for me and my kind, for that’s the joke about the playing card people. They think that no one is in earnest except those who are playing their fascinating and picturesque game.

“What will your work be this winter?” asked the Queen of Clubs of the Queen of Diamonds.
“Oh,” sighed the Queen of Diamonds, “the Russian Jews. I find them so interesting.”
“Ah,” said the Queen of Clubs, “I shall stick to my Italians.” And I slipped away and left them discussing the theory of “Freedom as It Is Found in the College Settlement.” 

I don’t think they even knew I had gone.

The Queen of Diamonds used to be a clever, warm-hearted, witty girl. She was the life of her whole family, but she caught the settlement fever, and now she never remembers that she has any family of her own at all. 

She worries over the Russian Jews, she’s concerned about the Italians, and, oh, the Huns—what shall we do to uplift them? And her own little sister is getting into very frivolous company, and her own brother smokes a good many more cigarettes than are good for him, and her own mother is slipping into neglected old age, and she never sees it. She’s so busy playing the game.

They’re good people, the picture card people; clever, too, most of them; but, oh, if they would only realize that one woman who earns her own living and takes care of her own children and cooks her own food—the very woman they are so anxious to uplift, as they call it—is worth any two dozen little picture card theorists in the world.

The Queen of Clubs visits the tenements, and the tenements laugh when they see her coming. Poor Queen of Clubs, and she so dead in earnest, too! But after all it is rather funny to see an unmarried woman roosting on the edge of wash-tubs trying to tell the mother of a family how to be a mother. 

Her theories are all very hygienic and very fine; but, dear me, there’s the rent to pay and the clothes to wash and the children to dress. Nobody but the picture card people have time enough to stop and theorize about hygiene. So the tenement mother listens as politely as she can and wonders and lets it go at that.

Poor picture card people! How seriously they take themselves and their well meant little game!