They were laughing at her.
Maiden Lane was an Assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury but in addition to that, she was a woman of high-percentile physical attractiveness. A slender, tightly-curved woman of forty-five—a glimmering Venus—she illuminated the otherwise murky cosmos of grim bankers.
Ms. Lane had made her sacrifices to the gods of vanity performing self-flagellating penance on hotel elliptical machines at four a.m. almost every morning for nearly twenty years. Her high firm features and smoothly-defined legs were accentuated by a wardrobe of tight-fitting business suits—black, thigh-length business suits.
She often pondered all those women she had passed along the way up the career ladder. She pitied those androgynous trolls, as she referred to them, mocking how they sheathed their swords of sensuality in scabbards of shaggy uni-brows and general frumpiness. Losers, she regarded them.
Maiden, or Mae for short, had no regrets about wielding her aesthetic weapons. You have to think like a winner in order to win, she reminded herself in her rare moments of doubt. Never project weakness. Never go on the defensive. Never pull a punch. A woman must use everything she’s got if she wants to reach the capstone. It’s a man-eat-man world.
…Continue Reading about Indivisible: With Justice for Some by Troy Grice
