CHAPTER I

The effect of grief is commonly reputed to be noble.  But mostly it is a sterile nobility.  Witness the widows who drape their musty weeds over all the living; witness the mother of a son killed in war who urges her son’s comrades to bring mourning to the mothers of all the sons on the other side.

Grief is a paralyzing poison.  It broke down Una’s resistance to the cares of the office.  Hers was no wholesome labor in which she could find sacred forgetfulness.  It was the round of unessentials which all office-women know so desperately well.  She bruised herself by shrinking from those hourly insults to her intelligence; and outside the office her most absorbing comfort was in the luxury of mourning — passion in black, even to the black-edged face-veil....  Though she was human enough to realize that with her fair hair she looked rather well in mourning, and shrewd enough to get it on credit at excellent terms.

She was in the office all day, being as curtly exact as she could.  But in the evening she sat alone in her flat and feared the city.

Sometimes she rushed down to the Sessionses’ flat, but the good people bored her with their assumption that she was panting to know all the news from Panama.  She had drifted so far away from the town that the sixth assertion that “it was a great pity Kitty Wilson was going to marry that worthless Clark boy” aroused no interest in her.  She was still more bored by their phonograph, on which they played over and over the same twenty records.  She would make quick, unconvincing excuses about having to hurry away.  Their slippered stupidity was a desecration of her mother’s memory.

Her half-hysterical fear of the city’s power was increased by her daily encounter with the clamorous streets, crowded elevators, frantic lunch-rooms, and, most of all, the experience of the Subway.

Amazing, incredible, the Subway, and the fact that human beings could become used to it, consent to spend an hour in it daily.  There was a heroic side to this spectacle of steel trains clanging at forty miles an hour beneath twenty-story buildings.  The engineers had done their work well, made a great thought in steel and cement.  And then the business men and bureaucrats had made the great thought a curse.  There was in the Subway all the romance which story-telling youth goes seeking:  trains crammed with an inconceivable complexity of people — marquises of the Holy Roman Empire, Jewish factory hands, speculators from Wyoming, Iowa dairymen, quarreling Italian lovers, with their dramatic tales, their flux of every human emotion, under the city mask.  But however striking these dramatic characters may be to the occasional spectator, they figure merely as an odor, a confusion, to the permanent serf of the Subway....  A long underground station, a catacomb with a cement platform, this was the chief feature of the city vista to the tired girl who waited there each morning.  A clean space, but damp, stale, like the corridor to a prison — as indeed it was, since through it each morning Una entered the day’s business life.

Then, the train approaching, filling the tunnel, like a piston smashing into a cylinder; the shoving rush to get aboard.  A crush that was ruffling and fatiguing to a man, but to a woman was horror.

Una stood with a hulking man pressing as close to her side as he dared, and a dapper clerkling squeezed against her breast.  Above her head, to represent the city’s culture and graciousness, there were advertisements of soap, stockings, and collars.  At curves the wheels ground with a long, savage whine, the train heeled, and she was flung into the arms of the grinning clerk, who held her tight.  She, who must never be so unladylike as to enter a polling-place, had breathed into her very mouth the clerkling’s virile electoral odor of cigarettes and onions and decayed teeth.

A very good thing, the Subway.  It did make Una quiver with the beginnings of rebellious thought as no suave preacher could ever have done.  Almost hysterically she resented this daily indignity, which smeared her clean, cool womanhood with a grease of noise and smell and human contact.

As was the Subway, so were her noons of elbowing to get impure food in restaurants.

For reward she was permitted to work all day with Troy Wilkins.  And for heavens and green earth, she had a chair and a desk.

But the human organism, which can modify itself to arctic cold and Indian heat, to incessant labor or the long enervation of luxury, learns to endure.  Unwilling dressing, lonely breakfast, the Subway, dull work, lunch, sleepiness after lunch, the hopelessness of three o’clock, the boss’s ill-tempers, then the Subway again, and a lonely flat with no love, no creative work; and at last a long sleep so that she might be fresh for such another round of delight.  So went the days.  Yet all through them she found amusement, laughed now and then, and proved the heroism as well as the unthinking servility of the human race.

Se

The need of feeling that there were people near to her urged Una to sell her furniture and move from the flat to a boarding-house.

She avoided Mrs. Sessions’s advice.  She was sure that Mrs. Sessions would bustle about and find her a respectable place where she would have to be cheery.  She didn’t want to be cheery.  She wanted to think.  She even bought a serious magazine with articles.  Not that she read it.

But she was afraid to be alone any more.  Anyway, she would explore the city.

Of the many New Yorks, she had found only Morningside Park, Central Park, Riverside Drive, the shopping district, the restaurants and theaters which Walter had discovered to her, a few down-town office streets, and her own arid region of flats.  She did not know the proliferating East Side, the factories, the endless semi-suburban stretches — nor Fifth Avenue.  Her mother and Mrs. Sessions had inculcated in her the earnest idea that most parts of New York weren’t quite nice.  In over two years in the city she had never seen a millionaire nor a criminal; she knew the picturesqueness neither of wealth nor of pariah poverty.

She did not look like an adventurer when, at a Saturday noon of October, she left the office — slight, kindly, rather timid, with her pale hair and school-teacher eye-glasses, and clear cheeks set off by comely mourning.  But she was seizing New York.  She said over and over, “Why, I can go and live any place I want to, and maybe I’ll meet some folks who are simply fascinating.”  She wasn’t very definite about these fascinating folks, but they implied girls to play with and — she hesitated — and decidedly men, men different from Walter, who would touch her hand in courtly reverence.

She poked through strange streets.  She carried an assortment of “Rooms and Board” clippings from the “want-ad” page of a newspaper, and obediently followed their hints about finding the perfect place.  She resolutely did not stop at places not advertised in the paper, though nearly every house, in some quarters, had a sign, “Room to Rent.”  Una still had faith in the veracity of whatever appeared in the public prints, as compared with what she dared see for herself.

The advertisements led her into a dozen parts of the city frequented by roomers, the lonely, gray, detached people who dwell in other people’s houses.

It was not so splendid a quest as she had hoped; it was too sharp a revelation of the cannon-food of the city, the people who had never been trained, and who had lost heart.  It was scarcely possible to tell one street from another; to remember whether she was on Sixteenth Street or Twenty-sixth.  Always the same rows of red-brick or brownstone houses, all alike, the monotony broken only by infrequent warehouses or loft-buildings; always the same doubtful mounting of stone steps, the same searching for a bell, the same waiting, the same slatternly, suspicious landlady, the same evil hallway with a brown hat-rack, a steel-engraving with one corner stained with yellow, a carpet worn through to the flooring in a large oval hole just in front of the stairs, a smell of cabbage, a lack of ventilation.  Always the same desire to escape, though she waited politely while the landlady in the same familiar harsh voice went through the same formula.

Then, before she could flee to the comparatively fresh air of the streets, Una would politely have to follow the panting landlady to a room that was a horror of dirty carpet, lumpy mattress, and furniture with everything worn off that could wear off.  And at last, always the same phrases by which Una meant to spare the woman:  “Well, I’ll think it over.  Thank you so much for showing me the rooms, but before I decide — Want to look around — ”

Phrases which the landlady heard ten times a day.

She conceived a great-hearted pity for landladies.  They were so patient, in face of her evident distaste.  Even their suspiciousness was but the growling of a beaten dog.  They sighed and closed their doors on her without much attempt to persuade her to stay.  Her heart ached with their lack of imagination.  They had no more imagination than those landladies of the insect world, the spiders, with their unchanging, instinctive, ancestral types of webs.

Her depression was increased by the desperate physical weariness of the hunt.  Not that afternoon, not till two weeks later, did she find a room in a large, long, somber railroad flat on Lexington Avenue, conducted by a curly-haired young bookkeeper and his pretty wife, who provided their clients with sympathy, with extensive and scientific data regarding the motion-picture houses in the neighborhood, and board which was neither scientific nor very extensive.

It was time for Una to sacrifice the last material contact with her mother; to sell the furniture which she had known ever since, as a baby in Panama, she had crawled from this horsehair chair, all the long and perilous way across this same brown carpet, to this red-plush couch.

Se

It was not so hard to sell the furniture; she could even read and burn her father’s letters with an unhappy resoluteness.  Despite her tenderness, Una had something of youth’s joy in getting rid of old things, as preparation for acquiring the new.  She did sob when she found her mother’s straw hat, just as Mrs. Golden had left it, on the high shelf of the wardrobe as though her mother might come in at any minute, put it on, and start for a walk.  She sobbed again when she encountered the tiny tear in the bottom of the couch, which her own baby fingers had made in trying to enlarge a pirate’s cave.  That brought the days when her parents were immortal and all-wise; when the home sitting-room, where her father read the paper aloud, was a security against all the formidable world outside.

But to these recollections Una could shut her heart.  To one absurd thing, because it was living, Una could not shut her heart — to the senile canary.

Possibly she could have taken it with her, but she felt confusedly that Dickie would not be appreciated in other people’s houses.  She evaded asking the Sessionses to shelter the bird, because every favor that she permitted from that smug family was a bond that tied her to their life of married spinsterhood.

“Oh, Dickie, Dickie, what am I going to do with you?” she cried, slipping a finger through the wires of the cage.

The canary hopped toward her and tried to chirp his greeting.

“Even when you were sick you tried to sing to me, and mother did love you,” she sighed.  “I just can’t kill you — trusting me like that.”

She turned her back, seeking to solve the problem by ignoring it.  While she was sorting dresses — some trace of her mother in every fold, every wrinkle of the waists and lace collars — she was listening to the bird in the cage.

“I’ll think of some way — I’ll find somebody who will want you, Dickie dear,” she murmured, desperately, now and then.

After dinner and nightfall, with her nerves twanging all the more because it seemed silly to worry over one dissolute old bird when all her life was breaking up, she hysterically sprang up, snatched Dickie from the cage, and trotted down-stairs to the street.

“I’ll leave you somewhere.  Somebody will find you,” she declared.

Concealing the bird by holding it against her breast with a hand supersensitive to its warm little feathers, she walked till she found a deserted tenement doorway.  She hastily set the bird down on a stone balustrade beside the entrance steps.  Dickie chirped more cheerily, more sweetly than for many days, and confidingly hopped back to her hand.

“Oh, I can’t leave him for boys to torture and I can’t take him, I can’t — ”

In a sudden spasm she threw the bird into the air, and ran back to the flat, sobbing, “I can’t kill it — I can’t — there’s so much death.”  Longing to hear the quavering affection of its song once more, but keeping herself from even going to the window, to look for it, with bitter haste she completed her work of getting rid of things — things — things — the things which were stones of an imprisoning past.

Se

Shyness was over Una when at last she was in the house of strangers.  She sat marveling that this square, white cubby-hole of a room was hers permanently, that she hadn’t just come here for an hour or two.  She couldn’t get it to resemble her first impression of it.  Now the hallway was actually a part of her life — every morning she would face the picture of a magazine-cover girl when she came out of her room.

Her agitation was increased by the problem of keeping up the maiden modesty appropriate to a Golden, a young female friend of the Sessionses’, in a small flat with gentlemen lodgers and just one bathroom.  Una was saved by not having a spinster friend with whom to share her shrinking modesty.  She simply had to take waiting for her turn at the bathroom as a matter of course, and insensibly she was impressed by the decency with which these dull, ordinary people solved the complexities of their enforced intimacy.  When she wildly clutched her virgin bathrobe about her and passed a man in the hall, he stalked calmly by without any of the teetering apologies which broad-beamed Mr. Sessions had learned from his genteel spouse.

She could not at first distinguish among her companions.  Gradually they came to be distinct, important.  They held numberless surprises for her.  She would not have supposed that a bookkeeper in a fish-market would be likely to possess charm.  Particularly if he combined that amorphous occupation with being a boarding-house proprietor.  Yet her landlord, Herbert Gray, with his look of a track-athlete, his confessions of ignorance and his naïve enthusiasms about whatever in the motion pictures seemed to him heroic, large, colorful, was as admirable as the several youngsters of her town who had plodded through Princeton or Pennsylvania and come back to practise law or medicine or gentlemanly inheritance of business.  And his wife, round and comely, laughing easily, wearing her clothes with an untutored grace which made her cheap waists smart, was so thoroughly her husband’s comrade in everything, that these struggling nobodies had all the riches of the earth.

The Grays took Una in as though she were their guest, but they did not bother her.  They were city-born, taught by the city to let other people live their own lives.

The Grays had taken a flat twice too large for their own use.  The other lodgers, who lived, like monks on a bare corridor, along the narrow “railroad” hall, were three besides Una: 

A city failure, one with a hundred thousand failures, a gray-haired, neat man, who had been everything and done nothing, and who now said evasively that he was “in the collection business.”  He read Dickens and played a masterful game of chess.  He liked to have it thought that his past was brave with mysterious splendors.  He spoke hintingly of great lawyers.  But he had been near to them only as a clerk for a large law firm.  He was grateful to any one for noticing him.  Like most of the failures, he had learned the art of doing nothing at all.  All Sunday, except for a two hours’ walk in Central Park, and one game of chess with Herbert Gray, he dawdled in his room, slept, regarded his stocking-feet with an appearance of profound meditation, yawned, picked at the Sunday newspaper.  Una once saw him napping on a radiant autumn Sunday afternoon, and detested him.  But he was politely interested in her work for Troy Wilkins, carefully exact in saying, “Good-morning, miss,” and he became as familiar to her as the gas-heater in her cubicle.

Second fellow-lodger was a busy, reserved woman, originally from Kansas City, who had something to do with some branch library.  She had solved the problems of woman’s lack of place in this city scheme by closing tight her emotions, her sense of adventure, her hope of friendship.  She never talked to Una, after discovering that Una had no interesting opinions on the best reading for children nine to eleven.

These gentle, inconsequential city waifs, the Grays, the failure, the library-woman, meant no more to Una than the crowds who were near, yet so detached, in the streets.  But the remaining boarder annoyed her by his noisy whine.  He was an underbred maverick, with sharp eyes of watery blue, a thin mustache, large teeth, and no chin worth noticing.  He would bounce in of an evening, when the others were being decorous and dull in the musty dining-room, and yelp:  “How do we all find our seskpadalian selves this bright and balmy evenin’?  How does your perspegacity discipulate, Herby?  What’s the good word, Miss Golden?  Well, well, well, if here ain’t our good old friend, the Rev. J. Pilkington Corned Beef; how ‘r’ you, Pilky?  Old Mrs. Cabbage feelin’ well, too?  Well, well, still discussing the movies, Herby?  Got any new opinions about Mary Pickford?  Well, well.  Say, I met another guy that’s as nutty as you, Herby; he thinks that Wilhelm Jenkins Bryan is a great statesman.  Let’s hear some more about the Sage of Free Silver, Herby.”

The little man was never content till he had drawn them into so bitter an argument that some one would rise, throw down a napkin, growl, “Well, if that’s all you know about it — if you’re all as ignorant as that, you simply ain’t worth arguing with,” and stalk out.  When general topics failed, the disturber would catechize the library-woman about Louisa M. Alcott, or the failure about his desultory inquiries into Christian Science, or Mrs. Gray about the pictures plastering the dining-room — a dozen spiritual revelations of apples and oranges, which she had bought at a department-store sale.

The maverick’s name was Fillmore J. Benson.  Strangers called him Benny, but his more intimate acquaintances, those to whom he had talked for at least an hour, were requested to call him Phil.  He made a number of pretty puns about his first name.  He was, surprisingly, a doctor — not the sort that studies science, but the sort that studies the gullibility of human nature — a “Doctor of Manipulative Osteology.”  He had earned a diploma by a correspondence course, and had scrabbled together a small practice among retired shopkeepers.  He was one of the strange, impudent race of fakers who prey upon the clever city.  He didn’t expect any one at the Grays’ to call him a “doctor.”

He drank whisky and gambled for pennies, was immoral in his relations with women and as thick-skinned as he was blatant.  He had been a newsboy, a contractor’s clerk, and climbed up by the application of his wits.  He read enormously — newspapers, cheap magazines, medical books; he had an opinion about everything, and usually worsted every one at the Grays’ in arguments.  And he did his patients good by giving them sympathy and massage.  He would have been an excellent citizen had the city not preferred to train him, as a child in its reeling streets, to a sharp unscrupulousness.

Una was at first disgusted by Phil Benson, then perplexed.  He would address her in stately Shakespearean phrases which, as a boy, he had heard from the gallery of the Academy of Music.  He would quote poetry at her.  She was impressed when he almost silenced the library-woman, in an argument as to whether Longfellow or Whittier was the better poet, by parroting the whole of “Snow Bound.”

She fancied that Phil’s general pea-weevil aspect concealed the soul of a poet.  But she was shocked out of her pleasant fabling when Phil roared at Mrs. Gray:  “Say, what did the baker use this pie for?  A bureau or a trunk?  I’ve found three pairs of socks and a safety-pin in my slab, so far.”

Pretty Mrs. Gray was hurt and indignant, while her husband growled:  “Aw, don’t pay any attention to that human phonograph, Amy.  He’s got bats in his belfry.”

Una had acquired a hesitating fondness for the mute gentleness of the others, and it infuriated her that this insect should spoil their picnic.  But after dinner Phil Benson dallied over to her, sat on the arm of her chair, and said:  “I’m awfully sorry that I make such a bum hit with you, Miss Golden.  Oh, I can see I do, all right.  You’re the only one here that can understand.  Somehow it seems to me — you aren’t like other women I know.  There’s something — somehow it’s different.  A — a temperament.  You dream about higher things than just food and clothes.  Oh,” he held up a deprecating hand, “don’t deny it.  I’m mighty serious about it, Miss Golden.  I can see it, even if you haven’t waked up to it as yet.”

The absurd part of it was that, at least while he was talking, Mr. Phil Benson did believe what he was saying, though he had borrowed all of his sentiments from a magazine story about hobohemians which he had read the night before.

He also spoke of reading good books, seeing good plays, and the lack of good influences in this wicked city.

He didn’t overdo it.  He took leave in ten minutes — to find good influences in a Kelly pool-parlor on Third Avenue.  He returned to his room at ten, and, sitting with his shoeless feet cocked up on his bed, read a story in Racy Yarns.  While beyond the partition, about four feet from him, Una Golden lay in bed, her smooth arms behind her aching head, and worried about Phil’s lack of opportunity.

She was finding in his loud impudence a twisted resemblance to Walter Babson’s erratic excitability, and that won her, for love goes seeking new images of the god that is dead.

Next evening Phil varied his tactics by coming to dinner early, just touching Una’s hand as she was going into the dining-room, and murmuring in a small voice, “I’ve been thinking so much of the helpful things you said last evening, Miss Golden.”

Later, Phil talked to her about his longing to be a great surgeon — in which he had the tremendous advantage of being almost sincere.  He walked down the hall to her room, and said good-night lingeringly, holding her hand.

Una went into her room, closed the door, and for full five minutes stood amazed.  “Why!” she gasped, “the little man is trying to make love to me!”

She laughed over the absurdity of it.  Heavens!  She had her Ideal.  The Right Man.  He would probably be like Walter Babson — though more dependable.  But whatever the nature of the paragon, he would in every respect be just the opposite of the creature who had been saying good-night to her.

She sat down, tried to read the paper, tried to put Phil out of her mind.  But he kept returning.  She fancied that she could hear his voice in the hall.  She dropped the paper to listen.

“I’m actually interested in him!” she marveled.  “Oh, that’s ridiculous!”

Se

Now that Walter had made a man’s presence natural to her, Una needed a man, the excitation of his touch, the solace of his voice.  She could not patiently endure a cloistered vacuousness.

Even while she was vigorously representing to herself that he was preposterous, she was uneasily aware that Phil was masculine.  His talons were strong; she could feel their clutch on her hands.  “He’s a rat.  And I do wish he wouldn’t — spit!” she shuddered.  But under her scorn was a surge of emotion....  A man, not much of a man, yet a man, had wanted the contact of her hand, been eager to be with her.  Sensations vast as night or the ocean whirled in her small, white room.  Desire, and curiosity even more, made her restless as a wave.

She caught herself speculating as she plucked at the sleeve of her black mourning waist:  “I wonder would I be more interesting if I had the orange-and-brown dress I was going to make when mother died?...  Oh, shame!”

Yet she sprang up from the white-enameled rocker, tucked in her graceless cotton corset-cover, stared at her image in the mirror, smoothed her neck till the skin reddened.

Se

Phil talked to her for an hour after their Sunday-noon dinner.  She had been to church; had confessed indeterminate sins to a formless and unresponsive deity.  She felt righteous, and showed it.  Phil caught the cue.  He sacrificed all the witty things he was prepared to say about Mrs. Gray’s dumplings; he gazed silently out of the window till she wondered what he was thinking about, then he stumblingly began to review a sermon which he said he had heard the previous Sunday — though he must have been mistaken, as he shot several games of Kelly pool every Sunday morning, or slept till noon.

“The preacher spoke of woman’s influence.  You don’t know what it is to lack a woman’s influence in a fellow’s life, Miss Golden.  I can see the awful consequences among my patients.  I tell you, when I sat there in church and saw the colored windows — ” He sighed portentously.  His hand fell across hers — his lean paw, strong and warm-blooded from massaging puffy old men.  “I tell you I just got sentimental, I did, thinking of all I lacked.”

Phil melted mournfully away — to indulge in a highly cheerful walk on upper Broadway with Miss Becky Rosenthal, sewer for the Sans Peur Pants and Overalls Company — while in her room Una grieved over his forlorn desire to be good.

Se

Two evenings later, when November warmed to a passing Indian summer of golden skies that were pitifully far away from the little folk in city streets, Una was so restless that she set off for a walk by herself.

Phil had been silent, glancing at her and away, as though he were embarrassed.

“I wish I could do something to help him,” she thought, as she poked down-stairs to the entrance of the apartment-house.

Phil was on the steps, smoking a cigarette-sized cigar, scratching his chin, and chattering with his kinsmen, the gutter sparrows.

He doffed his derby.  He spun his cigar from him with a deft flip of his fingers which somehow agitated her.  She called herself a little fool for being agitated, but she couldn’t get rid of the thought that only men snapped their fingers like that.

“Goin’ to the movies, Miss Golden?”

“No, I was just going for a little walk.”

“Well, say, walks, that’s where I live.  Why don’t you invite Uncle Phil to come along and show you the town?  Why, I knew this burg when they went picnicking at the reservoir in Bryant Park.”

He swaggered beside her without an invitation.  He did not give her a chance to decline his company — and soon she did not want to.  He led her down to Gramercy Park, loveliest memory of village days, houses of a demure red and white ringing a fenced garden.  He pointed out to her the Princeton Club, the Columbia Club, the National Arts, and the Players’, and declared that two men leaving the last were John Drew and the most famous editor in America.  He guided her over to Stuyvesant Park, a barren square out of old London, with a Quaker school on one side, and the voluble Ghetto on the other.  He conducted her through East Side streets, where Jewish lovers parade past miles of push-carts and venerable Rabbis read the Talmud between sales of cotton socks, and showed her a little cafe which was a hang-out for thieves.  She was excited by this contact with the underworld.

He took her to a Lithuanian restaurant, on a street which was a debacle.  One half of the restaurant was filled with shaggy Lithuanians playing cards at filthy tables; the other half was a clean haunt for tourists who came to see the slums, and here, in the heart of these “slums,” saw only one another.

“Wait a while,” Phil said, “and a bunch of Seeing-New-Yorkers will land here and think we’re crooks.”

In ten minutes a van-load of sheepish trippers from the Middle West filed into the restaurant and tried to act as though they were used to cocktails.  Una was delighted when she saw them secretly peering at Phil and herself; she put one hand on her thigh and one on the table, leaned forward and tried to look tough, while Phil pretended to be quarreling with her, and the trippers’ simple souls were enthralled by this glimpse of two criminals.  Una really enjoyed the acting; for a moment Phil was her companion in play; and when the trippers had gone rustling out to view other haunts of vice she smiled at Phil unrestrainedly.

Instantly he took advantage of her smile, of their companionship.

He was really as simple-hearted as the trippers in his tactics.

She had been drinking ginger-ale.  He urged her now to “have a real drink.”  He muttered confidentially:  “Have a nip of sherry or a New Orleans fizz or a Bronx.  That’ll put heart into you.  Not enough to affect you a-tall, but just enough to cheer up on.  Then we’ll go to a dance and really have a time.  Gee! poor kid, you don’t get any fun.”

“No, no, I never touch it,” she said, and she believed it, forgetting the claret she had drunk with Walter Babson.

She felt unsafe.

He laughed at her; assured her from his medical experience that “lots of women need a little tonic,” and boisterously ordered a glass of sherry for her.

She merely sipped it.  She wanted to escape.  All their momentary frankness of association was gone.  She feared him; she hated the complaisant waiter who brought her the drink; the fat proprietor who would take his pieces of silver, though they were the price of her soul; the policeman on the pavement, who would never think of protecting her; and the whole hideous city which benignly profited by saloons.  She watched another couple down at the end of the room — an obese man and a young, pretty girl, who was hysterically drunk.  Not because she had attended the Women’s Christian Temperance Union at Panama and heard them condemn “the demon rum,” but because the sickish smell of the alcohol was all about her now, she suddenly turned into a crusader.  She sprang up, seized her gloves, snapped, “I will not touch the stuff.”  She marched down the room, out of the restaurant and away, not once looking back at Phil.

In about fifteen seconds she had a humorous picture of Phil trying to rush after her, but stopped by the waiter to pay his check.  She began to wonder if she hadn’t been slightly ridiculous in attempting to slay Demon Rum by careering down the restaurant.  But “I don’t care!” she said, stoutly.  “I’m glad I took a stand instead of just rambling along and wondering what it was all about, the way I did with Walter.”

Phil caught up to her and instantly began to complain.  “Say, you certainly made a sight out of yourself — and out of me — leaving me sitting there with the waiter laughing his boob head off at me.  Lord!  I’ll never dare go near the place again.”

“Your own fault.”  This problem was so clear, so unconfused to her.

“It wasn’t all my fault,” he said.  “You didn’t have to take a drink.”  His voice fell to a pathetic whimper.  “I was showing you hospitality the best way I knew how.  You won’t never know how you hurt my feelin’s.”

The problem instantly became complicated again.  Perhaps she had hurt his rudimentary sense of courtesy.  Perhaps Walter Babson would have sympathized with Phil, not with her.  She peeped at Phil.  He trailed along with a forlorn baby look which did not change.

She was very uncomfortable as she said a brief good-night at the flat.  She half wished that he would give her a chance to recant.  She saw him and his injured feelings as enormously important.

She undressed in a tremor of misgiving.  She put her thin, pretty kimono over her nightgown, braided her hair, and curled on the bed, condemning herself for having been so supercilious to the rat who had never had a chance.

It was late — long after eleven — when there was a tapping on the door.

She started, listened rigidly.

Phil’s voice whispered from the hall:  “Open your door just half an inch,
Miss Golden.  Something I wanted to say.”

Her pity for him made his pleading request like a command.  She drew her kimono close and peeped out at him.

“I knew you were up,” he whispered; “saw the light under your door.  I been so worried.  I didn’t mean to shock you, or nothing, but if you feel I did mean to, I want to apologize.  Gee! me, I couldn’t sleep one wink if I thought you was offended.”

“It’s all right — ” she began.

“Say, come into the dining-room.  Everybody gone to bed.  I want to explain — gee! you gotta give me a chance to be good.  If you don’t use no good influence over me, nobody never will, I guess.”

His whisper was full of masculine urgency, husky, bold.  She shivered.  She hesitated, did not answer.

“All right,” he mourned.  “I don’t blame you none, but it’s pretty hard — ”

“I’ll come just for a moment,” she said, and shut the door.

She was excited, flushed.  She wrapped her braids around her head, gentle braids of pale gold, and her undistinguished face, thus framed, was young and sweet.

She hastened out to the dining-room.

What was the “parlor” by day the Grays used for their own bedroom, but the dining-room had a big, ugly, leather settee and two rockers, and it served as a secondary living-room.

Here Phil waited, at the end of the settee.  She headed for a rocker, but he piled sofa-cushions for her at the other end of the settee, and she obediently sank down there.

“Listen,” he said, in a tone of lofty lamentation, “I don’t know as I can ever, ever make you understand I just wanted to give you a good time.  I seen you was in mourning, and I thinks, ’Maybe you could brighten her up a little — ’”

“I am sorry I didn’t understand.”

“Una, Una!  Do you suppose you could ever stoop to helping a bad egg like me?” he demanded.

His hand fell on hers.  It comforted her chilly hand.  She let it lie there.  Speech became difficult for her.

“Why, why yes — ” she stammered.

In reaction to her scorn of him, she was all accepting faith.

“Oh, if you could — and if I could make you less lonely sometimes — ”

In his voice was a perilous tenderness; for the rat, trained to beguile neurotic patients in his absurd practice, could croon like the very mother of pity.

“Yes, I am lonely sometimes,” she heard herself admitting — far-off, dreaming, needing the close affection that her mother and Walter had once given her.

“Poor little girl — you’re so much better raised and educated than me, but you got to have friendship jus’ same.”

His arm was about her shoulder.  For a second she leaned against him.

All her scorn of him suddenly gathered in one impulse.  She sprang up — just in time to catch a grin on his face.

“You gutter-rat!” she said.  “You aren’t worth my telling you what you are.  You wouldn’t understand.  You can’t see anything but the gutter.”

He was perfectly unperturbed:  “Poor stuff, kid.  Weak come-back.  Sounds like a drayma.  But, say, listen, honest, kid, you got me wrong.  What’s the harm in a little hugging — ”

She fled.  She was safe in her room.  She stood with both arms outstretched.  She did not feel soiled by this dirty thing.  She was triumphant.  In the silhouette of a water-tank, atop the next-door apartment-house, she saw a strong tower of faith.

“Now I don’t have to worry about him.  I don’t have to make any more decisions.  I know!  I’m through!  No one can get me just because of curiosity about sex again.  I’m free.  I can fight my way through in business and still keep clean.  I can!  I was hungry for — for even that rat.  I — Una Golden!  Yes, I was.  But I don’t want to go back to him.  I’ve won!

“Oh, Walter, Walter, I do want you, dear, but I’ll get along without you, and I’ll keep a little sacred image of you.”

CHAPTER II

The three-fourths of Una employed in the office of Mr. Troy Wilkins was going through one of those periods of unchanging routine when all past drama seems unreal, when nothing novel happens nor apparently ever will happen — such a time of dull peacefulness as makes up the major part of our lives.

Her only definite impressions were the details of daily work, the physical aspects of the office, and the presence of the “Boss.”

Se

Day after day the same details of the job:  letters arriving, assorted, opened, answered by dictation, the answers sealed and stamped (and almost every day the same panting crisis of getting off some cosmically important letter)....  The reception of callers; welcome to clients; considerate but firm assurances to persons looking for positions that there was “no opening just at present — ” The suave answering of irritating telephone calls....  The filing of letters and plans; the clipping of real-estate-transfer items from newspapers....  The supervision of Bessie Kraker and the office-boy.

Equally fixed were the details of the grubby office itself.  Like many men who have pride in the smartest suburban homes available, Mr. Wilkins was content with an office shabby and inconvenient.  He regarded beautiful offices as in some way effeminate....  His wasn’t effeminate; it was undecorative as a filled ash-tray, despite Una’s daily following up of the careless scrubwomen with dust-cloth and whisk.  She knew every inch of it, as a gardener knows his plot.  She could never keep from noticing and running her finger along the pebbled glass of the oak-and-glass partition about Mr. Wilkins’s private office, each of the hundreds of times a day she passed it; and when she lay awake at midnight, her finger-tips would recall precisely the feeling of that rough surface, even to the sharp edges of a tiny flaw in the glass over the bookcase.

Or she would recall the floor-rag — symbol of the hard realness of the office grind....

It always hung over the twisted, bulbous lead pipes below the stationary basin in the women’s wash-room provided by the Septimus Building for the women on three floors.  It was a rag ancient and slate-gray, grotesquely stiff and grotesquely hairy at its frayed edges — a corpse of a scrub-rag in rigor mortis.  Una was annoyed with herself for ever observing so unlovely an object, but in the moment of relaxation when she went to wash her hands she was unduly sensitive to that eternal rag, and to the griminess of the wash-room — the cracked and yellow-stained wash-bowl, the cold water that stung in winter, the roller-towel which she spun round and round in the effort to find a dry, clean, square space, till, in a spasm of revulsion, she would bolt out of the wash-room with her face and hands half dried.

Woman’s place is in the home.  Una was doubtless purely perverse in competing with men for the commercial triumphs of running that gray, wet towel round and round on its clattering roller, and of wondering whether for the entire remainder of her life she would see that dead scrub-rag.

It was no less annoying a fact that Bessie and she had only one waste-basket, which was invariably at Bessie’s desk when Una reached for it.

Or that the door of the supply-cupboard always shivered and stuck.

Or that on Thursday, which is the three P.M. of the week, it seemed impossible to endure the tedium till Saturday noon; and that, invariably, her money was gone by Friday, so that Friday lunch was always a mere insult to her hunger, and she could never get her gloves from the cleaner till after Saturday pay-day.

Una knew the office to a point where it offered few beautiful surprises.

And she knew the tactics of Mr. Troy Wilkins.

All managers — “bosses” — “chiefs” — have tactics for keeping discipline; tricks which they conceive as profoundly hidden from their underlings, and which are intimately known and discussed by those underlings....  There are the bosses who “bluff,” those who lie, those who give good-fellowship or grave courtesy in lieu of wages.  None of these was Mr. Wilkins.  He was dully honest and clumsily paternal.  But he was a roarer, a grumbler; he bawled and ordained, in order to encourage industry and keep his lambs from asking for “raises.”  Thus also he tried to conceal his own mistakes; when a missing letter for which everybody had been anxiously searching was found on his own desk, instead of in the files, he would blare, “Well, why didn’t you tell me you put it on my desk, heh?” He was a delayer also and, in poker patois, a passer of the buck.  He would feebly hold up a decision for weeks, then make a whole campaign of getting his office to rush through the task in order to catch up; have a form of masculine-commuter hysterics because Una and Bessie didn’t do the typing in a miraculously short time....  He never cursed; he was an ecclesiastical believer that one of the chief aims of man is to keep from saying those mystic words “hell” and “damn”; but he could make “darn it” and “why in tunket” sound as profane as a gambling-den....  There was included in Una’s duties the pretense of believing that Mr. Wilkins was the greatest single-handed villa architect in Greater New York.  Sometimes it nauseated her.  But often he was rather pathetic in his shaky desire to go on having faith in his superseded ability, and she would willingly assure him that his rivals, the boisterous young firm of Soule, Smith & Fissleben, were frauds.

All these faults and devices of Mr. Troy Wilkins Una knew.  Doubtless he would have been astonished to hear that fact, on evenings in his plate-racked, much-raftered, highly built-in suburban dining-room, when he discoursed to the admiring Mrs. Wilkins and the mouse-like little Wilkinses on the art of office discipline; or mornings in the second smoker of the 8.16 train, when he told the other lords of the world that “these stenographers are all alike — you simply can’t get ’em to learn system.”

It is not recorded whether Mr. Wilkins also knew Una’s faults — her habit of falling a-dreaming at 3.30 and trying to make it up by working furiously at 4.30; her habit of awing the good-hearted Bessie Kraker by posing as a nun who had never been kissed nor ever wanted to be; her graft of sending the office-boy out for ten-cent boxes of cocoanut candy; and a certain resentful touchiness and ladylikeness which made it hard to give her necessary orders.  Mr. Wilkins has never given testimony, but he is not the villain of the tale, and some authorities have a suspicion that he did not find Una altogether perfect.

Se

It must not be supposed that Una or her million sisters in business were constantly and actively bored by office routine.

Save once or twice a week, when he roared, and once or twice a month, when she felt that thirteen dollars a week was too little, she rather liked Mr. Wilkins — his honesty, his desire to make comfortable homes for people, his cheerful “Good-morning!” his way of interrupting dictation to tell her antiquated but jolly stories, his stolid, dependable-looking face.

She had real satisfaction in the game of work — in winning points and tricks in doing her work briskly and well, in helping Mr. Wilkins to capture clients.  She was eager when she popped in to announce to him that a wary, long-pursued “prospect” had actually called.  She was rather more interested in her day’s work than are the average of meaningless humanity who sell gingham and teach algebra and cure boils and repair lawn-mowers, because she was daily more able to approximate perfection, to look forward to something better — to some splendid position at twenty or even twenty-five dollars a week.  She was certainly in no worse plight than perhaps ninety-five million of her free and notoriously red-blooded fellow-citizens.

But she was in no better plight.  There was no drama, no glory in affection, nor, so long as she should be tied to Troy Wilkins’s dwindling business, no immediate increase in power.  And the sameness, the unceasing discussions with Bessie regarding Mr. Wilkins — Mr. Wilkins’s hat, Mr. Wilkins’s latest command, Mr. Wilkins’s lost fountain-pen, Mr. Wilkins’s rudeness to the salesman for the Sky-line Roofing Company, Mr. Wilkins’s idiotic friendship for Muldoon, the contractor, Mr. Wilkins’s pronounced unfairness to the office-boy in regard to a certain lateness in arrival —

At best, Una got through day after day; at worst, she was as profoundly bored as an explorer in the arctic night.

Se

Una, the initiate New-Yorker, continued her study of city ways and city currents during her lunch-hours.  She went down to Broad Street to see the curb market; marveled at the men with telephones in little coops behind opened windows; stared at the great newspaper offices on Park Row, the old City Hall, the mingling on lower Broadway of sky-challenging buildings with the history of pre-Revolutionary days.  She got a momentary prejudice in favor of socialism from listening to an attack upon it by a noon-time orator — a spotted, badly dressed man whose favorite slur regarding socialists was that they were spotted and badly dressed.  She heard a negro shouting dithyrambics about some religion she could never make out.

Sometimes she lunched at a newspaper-covered desk, with Bessie and the office-boy, on cold ham and beans and small, bright-colored cakes which the boy brought in from a bakery.  Sometimes she had boiled eggs and cocoa at a Childs restaurant with stenographers who ate baked apples, rich Napoleons, and, always, coffee.  Sometimes at a cafeteria, carrying a tray, she helped herself to crackers and milk and sandwiches.  Sometimes at the Arden Tea Room, for women only, she encountered charity-workers and virulently curious literary ladies, whom she endured for the marked excellence of the Arden chicken croquettes.  Sometimes Bessie tempted her to a Chinese restaurant, where Bessie, who came from the East Side and knew a trick or two, did not order chop-suey, like a tourist, but noodles and eggs foo-young.

In any case, the lunch-hour and the catalogue of what she was so vulgar as to eat were of importance in Una’s history, because that hour broke the routine, gave her for an hour a deceptive freedom of will, of choice between Boston beans and — New York beans.  And her triumphant common sense was demonstrated, for she chose light, digestible food, and kept her head clear for the afternoon, while her overlord, Mr. Troy Wilkins, like vast numbers of his fellow business men, crammed himself with beefsteak-and-kidney pudding, drugged himself with cigar smoke and pots of strong coffee and shop-talk, spoke earnestly of the wickedness of drunkenness, and then, drunk with food and tobacco and coffee and talk, came back dizzy, blur-eyed, slow-nerved; and for two hours tried to get down to work.

After hours of trudging through routine, Una went home.

She took the Elevated now instead of the Subway.  That was important in her life.  It meant an entire change of scenery.

On the Elevated, beside her all evening, hovering over her bed at night, was Worry.

“Oh, I ought to have got all that Norris correspondence copied to-day.  I must get at it first thing in the morning....  I wonder if Mr. Wilkins was sore because I stayed out so long for lunch?...  What would I do if I were fired?”

So would she worry as she left the office.  In the evening she wouldn’t so much criticize herself as suddenly and without reason remember office settings and incidents — startle at a picture of the T-square at which she had stared while Mr. Wilkins was telephoning....  She wasn’t weary because she worried; she worried because she was weary from the airless, unnatural, straining life.  She worried about everything available, from her soul to her finger-nails; but the office offered the largest number of good opportunities.

“After all,” say the syndicated philosophers, “the office takes only eight or nine hours a day.  The other fifteen or sixteen, you are free to do as you wish — loaf, study, become an athlete.”  This illuminative suggestion is usually reinforced by allusions to Lincoln and Edison.

Only — you aren’t a Lincoln or an Edison, for the most part, and you don’t do any of those improving things.  You have the office with you, in you, every hour of the twenty-four, unless you sleep dreamlessly and forget — which you don’t.  Probably, like Una, you do not take any exercise to drive work-thoughts away.

She often planned to take exercise regularly; read of it in women’s magazines.  But she could never get herself to keep up the earnest clowning of bedroom calisthenics; gymnasiums were either reekingly crowded or too expensive — and even to think of undressing and dressing for a gymnasium demanded more initiative than was left in her fagged organism.  There was walking — but city streets become tiresomely familiar.  Of sports she was consistently ignorant.

So all the week she was in the smell and sound of the battle, until Saturday evening with its blessed rest — the clean, relaxed time which every woman on the job knows.

Saturday evening!  No work to-morrow!  A prospect of thirty-six hours of freedom.  A leisurely dinner, a languorous slowness in undressing, a hot bath, a clean nightgown, and fresh, smooth bed-linen.  Una went to bed early to enjoy the contemplation of these luxuries.  She even put on a lace bed-cap adorned with pink silk roses.  The pleasure of relaxing in bed, of looking lazily at the pictures in a new magazine, of drifting into slumber — not of stepping into a necessary sleep that was only the anteroom of another day’s labor....

Such was her greatest joy in this period of uneventfulness.

Se

Una was, she hoped, “trying to think about things.”  Naturally, one who used that boarding-house phrase could not think transformingly.

She wasn’t illuminative about Romain Rolland or Rodin or village welfare.  She was still trying to decide whether the suffrage movement was ladylike and whether Dickens or Thackeray was the better novelist.  But she really was trying to decide.

She compiled little lists of books to read, “movements” to investigate.  She made a somewhat incoherent written statement of what she was trying to do, and this she kept in her top bureau drawer, among the ribbons, collars, imitation pearl necklaces, handkerchiefs, letters from Walter, and photographs of Panama and her mother.

She took it out sometimes, and relieved the day’s accumulated suffering by adding such notes as: 

“Be nice & human w. employes if ever have any of own; office wretched hole anyway bec. of econ. system; W. used to say, why make worse by being cranky.”

Or: 

“Study music, it brings country and W. and poetry and everything; take piano les. when get time.”

So Una tramped, weary always at dusk, but always recreated at dawn, through one of those periods of timeless, unmarked months, when all drama seems past and unreal and apparently nothing will ever happen again.

Then, in one week, everything became startling — she found melodrama and a place of friendship.

CHAPTER III

“I’m tired of the Grays.  They’re very nice people, but they can’t talk,” said Una to Bessie Kraker, at lunch in the office, on a February day.

“How do yuh mean ‘can’t talk’?  Are they dummies?” inquired Bessie.

“Dummies?”

“Yuh, sure, deef and dumb.”

“Why, no, I mean they don’t talk my language — they don’t, oh, they don’t, I suppose you’d say ‘conversationalize.’  Do you see?”

“Oh yes,” said Bessie, doubtfully.  “Say, listen, Miss Golden.  Say, I don’t want to butt in, and maybe you wouldn’t be stuck on it much, but they say it’s a dead-swell place to live — Miss Kitson, the boss’s secretary where I was before, lived there — ”

“Say, for the love o’ Mike, say it:  Where?” interrupted the office-boy.

“You shut your nasty trap.  I was just coming to it.  The Temperance and Protection Home, on Madison Avenue just above Thirty-fourth.  They say it’s kind of strict, but, gee! there’s a’ ausgezeichnet bunch of dames there, artists and everything, and they say they feed you swell, and it only costs eight bucks a week.”

“Well, maybe I’ll look at it,” said Una, dubiously.

Neither the forbidding name nor Bessie’s moral recommendation made the Home for Girls sound tempting, but Una was hungry for companionship; she was cold now toward the unvarying, unimaginative desires of men.  Among the women “artists and everything” she might find the friends she needed.

The Temperance and Protection Home Club for Girls was in a solemn, five-story, white sandstone structure with a severe doorway of iron grill, solid and capable-looking as a national bank.  Una rang the bell diffidently.  She waited in a hall that, despite its mission settee and red-tiled floor, was barrenly clean as a convent.  She was admitted to the business-like office of Mrs. Harriet Fike, the matron of the Home.

Mrs. Fike had a brown, stringy neck and tan bangs.  She wore a mannish coat and skirt, flat shoes of the kind called “sensible” by everybody except pretty women, and a large silver-mounted crucifix.

“Well?” she snarled.

“Some one — I’d like to find out about coming here to live — to see the place, and so on.  Can you have somebody show me one of the rooms?”

“My dear young lady, the first consideration isn’t to ’have somebody show you’ or anybody else a room, but to ascertain if you are a fit person to come here.”

Mrs. Fike jabbed at a compartment of her desk, yanked out a corduroy-bound book, boxed its ears, slammed it open, glared at Una in a Christian and Homelike way, and began to shoot questions: 

“Whatcha name?”

“Una Golden.”

“Miss uh Miss?”

“I didn’t quite — ”

“Miss or Mrs., I said.  Can’t you understand English?”

“See here, I’m not being sent to jail that I know of!” Una rose, tremblingly.

Mrs. Fike merely waited and snapped:  “Sit down.  You look as though you had enough sense to understand that we can’t let people we don’t know anything about enter a decent place like this....  Miss or Mrs., I said?”

“Miss,” Una murmured, feebly sitting down again.

“What’s your denomination?...  No agnostics or Catholics allowed!”

Una heard herself meekly declaring, “Methodist.”

“Smoke?  Swear?  Drink liquor?  Got any bad habits?”

“No!”

“Got a lover, sweetheart, gentleman friend?  If so, what name or names?”

“No.”

“That’s what they all say.  Let me tell you that later, when you expect to have all these male cousins visit you, we’ll reserve the privilege to ask questions....  Ever served a jail sentence?”

“Now really !  Do I look it?”

“My dear miss, wouldn’t you feel foolish if I said ‘yes’? Have you?  I warn you we look these things up!”

“No, I have not.”

“Well, that’s comforting....  Age?”

“Twenty-six.”

“Parents living?  Name nearest relatives?  Nearest friends?  Present occupation?”

Even as she answered this last simple question and Mrs. Fike’s suspicious query about her salary, Una felt as though she were perjuring herself, as though there were no such place as Troy Wilkins’s office — and Mrs. Fike knew it; as though a large policeman were secreted behind the desk and would at any moment pop out and drag her off to jail.  She answered with tremorous carefulness.  By now, the one thing that she wanted to do was to escape from that Christian and strictly supervised Napoleon, Mrs. Fike, and flee back to the Grays.

“Previous history?” Mrs. Fike was grimly continuing, and she followed this question by ascertaining Una’s ambitions, health, record for insanity, and references.

Mrs. Fike closed the query-book, and observed: 

“Well, you are rather fresh, but you seem to be acceptable — and now you may look us over and see whether we are acceptable to you.  Don’t think for one moment that this institution needs you, or is trying to lift you out of a life of sin, or that we suppose this to be the only place in New York to live.  We know what we want — we run things on a scientific basis — but we aren’t so conceited as to think that everybody likes us.  Now, for example, I can see that you don’t like me and my ways one bit.  But Lord love you, that isn’t necessary.  The one thing necessary is for me to run this Home according to the book, and if you’re fool enough to prefer a slap-dash boarding-house to this hygienic Home, why, you’ll make your bed — or rather some slattern of a landlady will make it — and you can lie in it.  Come with me.  No; first read the rules.”

Una obediently read that the young ladies of the Temperance Home were forbidden to smoke, make loud noises, cook, or do laundry in their rooms, sit up after midnight, entertain visitors “of any sort except mothers and sisters” in any place in the Home, “except in the parlors for that purpose provided.”  They were not permitted to be out after ten unless their names were specifically entered in the “Out-late Book” before their going.  And they were “requested to answer all reasonable questions of matron, or board of visitors, or duly qualified inspectors, regarding moral, mental, physical, and commercial well-being and progress.”

Una couldn’t resist asking, “I suppose it isn’t forbidden to sleep in our rooms, is it?”

Mrs. Fike looked over her, through her, about her, and remarked:  “I’d advise you to drop all impudence.  You see, you don’t do it well.  We admit East Side Jews here and they are so much quicker and wittier than you country girls from Pennsylvania and Oklahoma, and Heaven knows where, that you might just as well give up and try to be ladies instead of humorists.  Come, we will take a look at the Home.”

By now Una was resolved not to let Mrs. Fike drive her away.  She would “show her”; she would “come and live here just for spite.”

What Mrs. Fike thought has not been handed down.

She led Una past a series of closets, each furnished with two straight chairs on either side of a table, a carbon print of a chilly-looking cathedral, and a slice of carpet on which one was rather disappointed not to find the label, “Bath Mat.”

“These are the reception-rooms where the girls are allowed to receive callers. Any time — up to a quarter to ten,” Mrs. Fike said.

Una decided that they were better fitted for a hair-dressing establishment.

The living-room was her first revelation of the Temperance Home as something besides a prison — as an abiding-place for living, eager, sensitive girls.  It was not luxurious, but it had been arranged by some one who made allowance for a weakness for pretty things, even on the part of young females observing the rules in a Christian home.  There was a broad fireplace, built-in book-shelves, a long table; and, in wicker chairs with chintz cushions, were half a dozen curious girls.  Una was sure that one of them, a fizzy-haired, laughing girl, secretly nodded to her, and she was comforted.

Up the stairs to a marvelous bathroom with tempting shower-baths, a small gymnasium, and, on the roof, a garden and loggia and basket-ball court.  It was cool and fresh up here, on even the hottest summer evenings, and here the girls were permitted to lounge in negligees till after ten, Mrs. Fike remarked, with a half-smile.

Una smiled back.

As they went through the bedroom floors, with Mrs. Fike stalking ahead, a graceful girl in lace cap and negligee came bouncing out of a door between them, drew herself up and saluted Mrs. Fike’s back, winked at Una amicably, and for five steps imitated Mrs. Fike’s aggressive stride.

“Yes, I would be glad to come here!” Una said, cheerfully, to Mrs. Fike, who looked at her suspiciously, but granted:  “Well, we’ll look up your references.  Meantime, if you like — or don’t like, I suppose — you might talk to a Mrs. Esther Lawrence, who wants a room-mate.”

“Oh, I don’t think I’d like a room-mate.”

“My dear young lady, this place is simply full of young persons who would like and they wouldn’t like — and forsooth we must change every plan to suit their high and mighty convenience!  I’m not at all sure that we shall have a single room vacant for at least six months, and of course — ”

“Well, could I talk to Mrs. — Lawrence, was it?”

“Most assuredly.  I expect you to talk to her!  Come with me.”

Una followed abjectly, and the matron seemed well pleased with her reformation of this wayward young woman.  Her voice was curiously anemic, however, as she rapped on a bedroom door and called, “Oh, Mrs. Lawrence!”

A husky, capable voice within, “Yeah, what is ’t?”

“It’s Mrs. Fike, deary.  I think I have a room-mate for you.”

“Well, you wait ’ll I get something on, will you!”

Mrs. Fike waited.  She waited two minutes.  She looked at a wrist-watch in a leather band while she tapped her sensibly clad foot.  She tried again:  “We’re waiting, deary!”

There was no answer from within, and it was two minutes more before the door was opened.

Una was conscious of a room pleasant with white-enameled woodwork; a denim-covered couch and a narrow, prim brass bed, a litter of lingerie and sheets of newspaper; and, as the dominating center of it all, a woman of thirty, tall, high-breasted, full-faced, with a nose that was large but pleasant, black eyes that were cool and direct and domineering — Mrs. Esther Lawrence.

“You kept us waiting so long,” complained Mrs. Fike.

Mrs. Lawrence stared at her as though she were an impudent servant.  She revolved on Una, and with a self-confident kindliness in her voice, inquired, “What’s your name, child?”

“Una Golden.”

“We’ll talk this over....  Thank you, Mrs. Fike.”

“Well, now,” Mrs. Fike endeavored, “be sure you both are satisfied — ”

“Don’t you worry!  We will, all right!”

Mrs. Fike glared at her and retired.

Mrs. Lawrence grinned, stretched herself on the couch, mysteriously produced a cigarette, and asked, “Smoke?”

“No, thanks.”

“Sit down, child, and be comfy.  Oh, would you mind opening that window?  Not supposed to smoke....  Poor Ma Fike — I just can’t help deviling her.  Please don’t think I’m usually as nasty as I am with her.  She has to be kept in her place or she’ll worry you to death....  Thanks....  Do sit down — woggle up the pillow on the bed and be comfy....  You look like a nice kid — me, I’m a lazy, slatternly, good-natured old hex, with all the bad habits there are and a profound belief that the world is a hell of a place, but I’m fine to get along with, and so let’s take a shot at rooming together.  If we scrap, we can quit instanter, and no bad feelings....  I’d really like to have you come in, because you look as though you were on, even if you are rather meek and kitteny; and I’m scared to death they’ll wish some tough little Mick on to me, or some pious sister who hasn’t been married and believes in pussy-footing around and taking it all to God in prayer every time I tell her the truth....  What do you think, kiddy?”

Una was by this cock-sure disillusioned, large person more delighted than by all the wisdom of Mr. Wilkins or the soothing of Mrs. Sessions.  She felt that, except for Walter, it was the first time since she had come to New York that she had found an entertaining person.

“Yes,” she said, “do let’s try it.”

“Good!  Now let me warn you first off, that I may be diverting at times, but I’m no good.  To-morrow I’ll pretend to be a misused and unfortunate victim, but your young and almost trusting eyes make me feel candid for about fifteen minutes.  I certainly got a raw deal from my beloved husband — that’s all you’ll hear from me about him.  By the way, I’m typical of about ten thousand married women in business about whose noble spouses nothing is ever said.  But I suppose I ought to have bucked up and made good in business (I’m a bum stenog. for Pitcairn, McClure & Stockley, the bond house).  But I can’t.  I’m too lazy, and it doesn’t seem worth while....  And, oh, we are exploited, women who are on jobs.  The bosses give us a lot of taffy and raise their hats — but they don’t raise our wages, and they think that if they keep us till two G.M. taking dictation they make it all right by apologizing.  Women are a lot more conscientious on jobs than men are — but that’s because we’re fools; you don’t catch the men staying till six-thirty because the boss has shystered all afternoon and wants to catch up on his correspondence.  But we — of course we don’t dare to make dates for dinner, lest we have to stay late.  We don’t dare!”

“I bet you do!”

“Yes — well, I’m not so much of a fool as some of the rest — or else more of a one.  There’s Mamie Magen — she’s living here; she’s with Pitcairn, too.  You’ll meet her and be crazy about her.  She’s a lame Jewess, and awfully plain, except she’s got lovely eyes, but she’s got a mind like a tack.  Well, she’s the little angel-pie about staying late, and some day she’ll probably make four thousand bucks a year.  She’ll be mayor of New York, or executive secretary of the Young Women’s Atheist Association or something.  But still, she doesn’t stay late and plug hard because she’s scared, but because she’s got ambition.  But most of the women — Lord! they’re just cowed sheep.”

“Yes,” said Una.

A million discussions of Women in Business going on — a thousand of them at just that moment, perhaps — men employers declaring that they couldn’t depend on women in their offices, women asserting that women were the more conscientious.  Una listened and was content; she had found some one with whom to play, with whom to talk and hate the powers....  She felt an impulse to tell Mrs. Lawrence all about Troy Wilkins and her mother and — and perhaps even about Walter Babson.  But she merely treasured up the thought that she could do that some day, and politely asked: 

“What about Mrs. Fike?  Is she as bad as she seems?”

“Why, that’s the best little skeleton of contention around here.  There’s three factions.  Some girls say she’s just plain devil — mean as a floor-walker.  That’s what I think — she’s a rotter and a four-flusher.  You notice the way she crawls when I stand up to her.  Why, they won’t have Catholics here, and I’m one of those wicked people, and she knows it!  When she asked my religion I told her I was a ’Romanist Episcopalian,’ and she sniffed and put me down as an Episcopalian — I saw her!...  Then some of the girls think she’s really good-hearted — just gruff — bark worse than her bite.  But you ought to see how she barks at some of the younger girls — scares ’em stiff — and keeps picking on them about regulations — makes their lives miserable.  Then there’s a third section that thinks she’s merely institutionalized — training makes her as hard as any other kind of a machine.  You’ll find lots like her in this town — in all the charities.”

“But the girls — they do have a good time here?”

“Yes, they do.  It’s sort of fun to fight Ma Fike and all the fool rules.  I enjoy smoking here twice as much as I would anywhere else.  And Fike isn’t half as bad as the board of visitors — bunch of fat, rich, old Upper-West-Siders with passementeried bosoms, doing tea-table charity, and asking us impertinent questions, and telling a bunch of hard-worked slaves to be virtuous and wash behind their ears — the soft, ignorant, conceited, impractical parasites!  But still, it’s all sort of like a cranky boarding-school for girls — and you know what fun the girls have there, with midnight fudge parties and a teacher pussy-footing down the hall trying to catch them.”

“I don’t know.  I’ve never been to one.”

“Well — doesn’t matter....  Another thing — some day, when you come to know more men — Know many?”

“Very few.”

“Well, you’ll find this town is full of bright young men seeking an economical solution of the sex problem — to speak politely — and you’ll find it a relief not to have them on your door-step.  ’S safe here....  Come in with me, kid.  Give me an audience to talk to.”

“Yes,” said Una.

Se

It was hard to leave the kindly Herbert Grays of the flat, but Una made the break and arranged all her silver toilet-articles — which consisted of a plated-silver hair-brush, a German-silver nail-file, and a good, plain, honest rubber comb — on the bureau in Mrs. Lawrence’s room.

With the shyness of a girl on her first night in boarding-school, Una stuck to Mrs. Lawrence’s side in the noisy flow of strange girls down to the dining-room.  She was used to being self-absorbed in the noisiest restaurants, but she was trembly about the knees as she crossed the room among curious upward glances; she found it very hard to use a fork without clattering it on the plate when she sat with Mrs. Lawrence and four strangers, at a table for six.

They all were splendidly casual and wise and good-looking.  With no men about to intimidate them — or to attract them — they made a solid phalanx of bland, satisfied femininity, and Una felt more barred out than in an office.  She longed for a man who would be curious about her, or cross with her, or perform some other easy, customary, simple-hearted masculine trick.

But she was taken into the friendship of the table when Mrs. Lawrence had finished a harangue on the cardinal sin of serving bean soup four times in two weeks.

“Oh, shut up, Lawrence, and introduce the new kid!” said one girl.

“You wait till I get through with my introductory remarks, Cassavant.  I’m inspired to-night.  I’m going to take a plate of bean soup and fit it over Ma Fike’s head — upside down.”

“Oh, give Ma Fike a rest!”

Una was uneasy.  She wasn’t sure whether this repartee was friendly good spirits or a nagging feud.  Like all the ungrateful human race, she considered whether she ought to have identified herself with the noisy Esther Lawrence on entering the Home.  So might a freshman wonder, or the guest of a club; always the amiable and vulgar Lawrences are most doubted when they are best-intentioned.

Una was relieved when she was welcomed by the four: 

Mamie Magen, the lame Jewess, in whose big brown eyes was an eternal prayer for all of harassed humanity.

Jennie Cassavant, in whose eyes was chiefly a prayer that life would keep on being interesting — she, the dark, slender, loquacious, observant child who had requested Mrs. Lawrence to shut up.

Rose Larsen, like a pretty, curly-haired boy, though her shoulders were little and adorable in a white-silk waist.

Mrs. Amesbury, a nun of business, pale and silent; her thin throat shrouded in white net; her voice low and self-conscious; her very blood seeming white — a woman with an almost morbid air of guarded purity, whom you could never associate with the frank crudities of marriage.  Her movements were nervous and small; she never smiled; you couldn’t be boisterous with her.  Yet, Mrs. Lawrence whispered she was one of the chief operators of the telephone company, and, next to the thoughtful and suffering Mamie Magen, the most capable woman she knew.

“How do you like the Tempest and Protest, Miss Golden?” the lively Cassavant said, airily.

“I don’t — ”

“Why!  The Temperance and Protection Home.”

“Well, I like Mrs. Fike’s shoes.  I should think they’d be fine to throw at cats.”

“Good work, Golden.  You’re admitted!”

“Say, Magen,” said Mrs. Lawrence, “Golden agrees with me about offices — no chance for women — ”

Mamie Magen sighed, and “Esther,” she said, in a voice which must naturally have been rasping, but which she had apparently learned to control like a violin — “Esther dear, if you could ever understand what offices have done for me!  On the East Side — always it was work and work and watch all the pretty girls in our block get T. B. in garment-factories, or marry fellows that weren’t any good and have a baby every year, and get so thin and worn out; and the garment-workers’ strikes and picketing on cold nights.  And now I am in an office — all the fellows are dandy and polite — not like the floor superintendent where I worked in a department store; he would call down a cash-girl for making change slow !  I have a chance to do anything a man can do.  The boss is just crazy to find women that will take an interest in the work, like it was their own you know, he told you so himself — ”

“Sure, I know the line of guff,” said Mrs. Lawrence.  “And you take an interest, and get eighteen plunks per for doing statistics that they couldn’t get a real college male in trousers to do for less than thirty-five.”

“Or put it like this, Lawrence,” said Jennie Cassavant.  “Magen admits that the world in general is a muddle, and she thinks offices are heaven because by comparison with sweat-shops they are half-way decent.”

The universal discussion was on.  Everybody but Una and the nun of business threw everything from facts to bread pills about the table, and they enjoyed themselves in as unfeminized and brutal a manner as men in a cafe.  Una had found some one with whom to talk her own shop — and shop is the only reasonable topic of conversation in the world; witness authors being intellectual about editors and romanticism; lovers absorbed in the technique of holding hands; or mothers interested in babies, recipes, and household ailments.

After dinner they sprawled all over the room of Una and Mrs. Lawrence, and talked about theaters, young men, and Mrs. Fike for four solid hours — all but the pretty, boyish Rose Larsen, who had a young man coming to call at eight.  Even the new-comer, Una, was privileged to take part in giving Rose extensive, highly detailed, and not entirely proper advice — advice of a completeness which would doubtless have astonished the suitor, then dressing somewhere in a furnished room and unconscious of the publicity of his call.  Una also lent Miss Larsen a pair of silk stockings, helped three other girls to coerce her curly hair, and formed part of the solemn procession that escorted her to the top of the stairs when the still unconscious young man was announced from below.  And it was Una who was able to see the young man without herself being seen, and to win notoriety by being able to report that he had smooth black hair, a small mustache, and carried a stick.

Una was living her boarding-school days now, at twenty-six.  The presence of so many possible friends gave her self-confidence and self-expression.  She went to bed happy that night, home among her own people, among the women who, noisy or reticent, slack or aspiring, were joined to make possible a life of work in a world still heavy-scented with the ideals of the harem.

CHAPTER IV

That same oasis of a week gave to Una her first taste of business responsibility, of being in charge and generally comporting herself as do males.  But in order to rouse her thus, Chance broke the inoffensive limb of unfortunate Mr. Troy Wilkins as he was stepping from his small bronchial motor-car to an icy cement block, on seven o’clock of Friday evening.

When Una arrived at the office on Saturday morning she received a telephone message from Mr. Wilkins, directing her to take charge of the office, of Bessie Kraker, and the office-boy, and the negotiations with the Comfy Coast Building and Development Company regarding the planning of three rows of semi-detached villas.

For three weeks the office was as different from the treadmill that it familiarly had been, as the Home Club and Lawrence’s controversial room were different from the Grays’ flat.  She was glad to work late, to arrive not at eight-thirty, but at a quarter to eight, to gallop down to a cafeteria for coffee and a sandwich at noon, to be patient with callers, and to try to develop some knowledge of spelling in that child of nature, Bessie Kraker.  She walked about the office quickly, glancing proudly at its neatness.  Daily, with an operator’s headgear, borrowed from the telephone company, over her head, she spent half an hour talking with Mr. Wilkins, taking his dictation, receiving his cautions and suggestions, reassuring him that in his absence the Subway ran and Tammany still ruled.  After an agitated conference with the vice-president of the Comfy Coast Company, during which she was eloquent as an automobile advertisement regarding Mr. Wilkins’s former masterpieces with their “every modern improvement, parquet floors, beam ceilings, plate-rack, hardwood trim throughout, natty and novel decorations,” Una reached the zenith of salesman’s virtues — she “closed the deal.”

Mr. Wilkins came back and hemmed and hawed a good deal; he praised the work she hadn’t considered well done, and pointed out faults in what she considered particularly clever achievements, and was laudatory but dissatisfying in general.  In a few days he, in turn, reached the zenith of virtue on the part of boss — he raised her salary.  To fifteen dollars a week.  She was again merely his secretary, however, and the office trudged through another normal period when all past drama seemed incredible and all the future drab.

But Una was certain now that she could manage business, could wheedle Bessies and face pompous vice-presidents and satisfy querulous Mr. Wilkinses.  She looked forward; she picked at architecture as portrayed in Mr. Wilkins’s big books; she learned the reason and manner of the rows of semi-detached, semi-suburban, semi-comfortable, semi-cheap, and somewhat less than semi-attractive houses.

She was not afraid of the office world now; she had a part in the city and a home.

Se

She thought of Walter Babson.  Sometimes, when Mrs. Lawrence was petulant or the office had been unusually exhausting, she fancied that she missed him.  But instead of sitting and brooding over folded hands, in woman’s ancient fashion, she took a man’s unfair advantage — she went up to the gymnasium of the Home Club and worked with the chest-weights and flying-rings — a solemn, happy, busy little figure.  She laughed more deeply, and she felt the enormous rhythm of the city, not as a menacing roar, but as a hymn of triumph.

She could never be intimate with Mamie Magen as she was with the frankly disillusioned Mrs. Lawrence; she never knew whether Miss Magen really liked her or not; her smile, which transfigured her sallow face, was equally bright for Una, for Mrs. Fike, and for beggars.  Yet it was Miss Magen whose faith in the purpose of the struggling world inspired Una.  Una walked with her up Madison Avenue, past huge old brownstone mansions, and she was unconscious of suiting her own quick step to Miss Magen’s jerky lameness as the Jewess talked of her ideals of a business world which should have generosity and chivalry and the accuracy of a biological laboratory; in which there would be no need of charity to employee....  Or to employer.

Mamie Magen was the most highly evolved person Una had ever known.  Una had, from books and newspapers and Walter Babson, learned that there were such things as socialists and earnest pessimists, and the race sketchily called “Bohemians” — writers and artists and social workers, who drank claret and made love and talked about the free theater, all on behalf of the brotherhood of man.  Una pictured the socialists as always attacking capitalists; the pessimists as always being bitter and egotistic; Bohemians as always being dissipated, but as handsome and noisy and gay.

But Mamie Magen was a socialist who believed that the capitalists with their profit-sharing and search for improved methods of production were as sincere in desiring the scientific era as were the most burning socialists; who loved and understood the most oratorical of the young socialists with their hair in their eyes, but also loved and understood the clean little college boys who came into business with a desire to make it not a war, but a crusade.  She was a socialist who was determined to control and glorify business; a pessimist who was, in her gentle reticent way, as scornful of half-churches, half-governments, half-educations, as the cynical Mrs. Lawrence.  Finally, she who was not handsome or dissipated or gay, but sallow and lame and Spartan, knew “Bohemia” better than most of the professional Hobohemians.  As an East Side child she had grown up in the classes and parties of the University Settlement; she had been held upon the then juvenile knees of half the distinguished writers and fighters for reform, who had begun their careers as settlement workers; she, who was still unknown, a clerk and a nobody, and who wasn’t always syntactical, was accustomed to people whose names had been made large and sonorous by newspaper publicity; and at the age when ambitious lady artists and derailed Walter Babsons came to New York and determinedly seized on Bohemia, Mamie Magen had outgrown Bohemia and become a worker.

To Una she explained the city, made it comprehensible, made art and economics and philosophy human and tangible.  Una could not always follow her, but from her she caught the knowledge that the world and all its wisdom is but a booby, blundering school-boy that needs management and could be managed, if men and women would be human beings instead of just business men, or plumbers, or army officers, or commuters, or educators, or authors, or clubwomen, or traveling salesmen, or Socialists, or Republicans, or Salvation Army leaders, or wearers of clothes.  She preached to Una a personal kinghood, an education in brotherhood and responsible nobility, which took in Una’s job as much as it did government ownership or reading poetry.

Se

Not always was Una breathlessly trying to fly after the lame but broad-winged Mamie Magen.  She attended High Mass at the Spanish church on Washington Heights with Mrs. Lawrence; felt the beauty of the ceremony; admired the simple, classic church; adored the padre; and for about one day planned to scorn Panama Methodism and become a Catholic, after which day she forgot about Methodism and Catholicism.  She also accompanied Mrs. Lawrence to a ceremony much less impressive and much less easily forgotten — to a meeting with a man.

Mrs. Lawrence never talked about her husband, but in this reticence she was not joined by Rose Dawn or Jennie Cassavant.  Jennie maintained that the misfitted Mr. Lawrence was alive, very much so; that Esther and he weren’t even divorced, but merely separated.  The only sanction Mrs. Lawrence ever gave to this report was to blurt out one night:  “Keep up your belief in the mysticism of love and all that kind of sentimental sex stuff as long as you can.  You’ll lose it some day fast enough.  Me, I know that a woman needs a man just the same as a man needs a woman — and just as darned unpoetically.  Being brought up a Puritan, I never can quite get over the feeling that I oughtn’t to have anything to do with men — me as I am — but believe me it isn’t any romantic ideal.  I sure want ’em.”

Mrs. Lawrence continually went to dinners and theaters with men; she told Una all the details, as women do, from the first highly proper handshake down in the pure-minded hall of the Home Club at eight, to the less proper good-night kiss on the dark door-step of the Home Club at midnight.  But she was careful to make clear that one kiss was all she ever allowed, though she grew dithyrambic over the charming, lonely men with whom she played — a young doctor whose wife was in a madhouse; a clever, restrained, unhappy old broker.

Once she broke out:  “Hang it!  I want love, and that’s all there is to it — that’s crudely all there ever is to it with any woman, no matter how much she pretends to be satisfied with mourning the dead or caring for children, or swatting a job or being religious or anything else.  I’m a low-brow; I can’t give you the economics of it and the spiritual brotherhood and all that stuff, like Mamie Magen.  But I know women want a man and love — all of it.”

Next evening she took Una to dinner at a German restaurant, as chaperon to herself and a quiet, insistent, staring, good-looking man of forty.  While Mrs. Lawrence and the man talked about the opera, their eyes seemed to be defying each other.  Una felt that she was not wanted.  When the man spoke hesitatingly of a cabaret, Una made excuse to go home.

Mrs. Lawrence did not return till two.  She moved about the room quietly, but Una awoke.

“I’m glad I went with him,” Mrs. Lawrence said, angrily, as though she were defending herself.

Una asked no questions, but her good little heart was afraid.  Though she retained her joy in Mrs. Lawrence’s willingness to take her and her job seriously, Una was dismayed by Mrs. Lawrence’s fiercely uneasy interest in men....  She resented the insinuation that the sharp, unexpected longing to feel Walter’s arms about her might be only a crude physical need for a man, instead of a mystic fidelity to her lost love.

Being a lame marcher, a mind which was admittedly “shocked at each discovery of the aliveness of theory,” Una’s observation of the stalking specter of sex did not lead her to make any very lucid conclusions about the matter.  But she did wonder a little if this whole business of marriages and marriage ceremonies and legal bonds which any clerkly pastor can gild with religiosity was so sacred as she had been informed in Panama.  She wondered a little if Mrs. Lawrence’s obvious requirement of man’s companionship ought to be turned into a sneaking theft of love.  Una Golden was not a philosopher; she was a workaday woman.  But into her workaday mind came a low light from the fire which was kindling the world; the dual belief that life is too sacred to be taken in war and filthy industries and dull education; and that most forms and organizations and inherited castes are not sacred at all.

Se

The aspirations of Mamie Magen and the alarming frankness of Mrs. Lawrence were not all her life at the Home Club.  With pretty Rose Larsen and half a dozen others she played.  They went in fluttering, beribboned parties to the theater; they saw visions at symphony concerts, and slipped into exhibits of contemporary artists at private galleries on Fifth Avenue.  When spring came they had walking parties in Central Park, in Van Cortlandt Park, on the Palisades, across Staten Island, and picnicked by themselves or with neat, trim-minded, polite men clerks from the various offices and stores where the girls worked.  They had a perpetual joy in annoying Mrs. Fike by parties on fire-escapes, by lobster Newburgh suppers at midnight.  They were discursively excited for a week when Rose Larsen was followed from the surface-car to the door by an unknown man; and they were unhappily excited when, without explanations, slim, daring Jennie Cassavant was suddenly asked to leave the Home Club; and they had a rose-lighted dinner when Livy Hedger announced her engagement to a Newark lawyer.

Various were the Home Club women in training and work and ways; they were awkward stenographers and dependable secretaries; fashion artists and department-store clerks; telephone girls and clever college-bred persons who actually read manuscripts and proof, and wrote captions or household-department squibs for women’s magazines — real editors, or at least real assistant editors; persons who knew authors and illustrators, as did the great Magen.  They were attendants in dentists’ offices and teachers in night-schools and filing-girls and manicurists and cashiers and blue-linen-gowned super-waitresses in artistic tea-rooms.  And cliques, caste, they did have.  Yet their comradeship was very sweet, quite real; the factional lines were not drawn according to salary or education or family, but according to gaiety or sobriety or propriety.

Una was finding not only her lost boarding-school days, but her second youth — perhaps her first real youth.

Though the questions inspired by the exceptional Miss Magen and the defiant Mrs. Lawrence kept her restless, her association with the play-girls, her growing acquaintanceship with women who were easy-minded, who had friends and relatives and a place in the city, who did not agonize about their jobs or their loves, who received young men casually and looked forward to marriage and a comfortable flat in Harlem, made Una feel the city as her own proper dwelling.  Now she no longer plodded along the streets wonderingly, a detached little stranger; she walked briskly and contentedly, heedless of crowds, returning to her own home in her own city.  Most workers of the city remain strangers to it always.  But chance had made Una an insider.

It was another chapter in the making of a business woman, that spring of happiness and new stirrings in the Home Club; it was another term in the unplanned, uninstructed, muddling, chance-governed college which civilization unwittingly keeps for the training of men and women who will carry on the work of the world.

It passed swiftly, and July and vacation-time came to Una.

CHAPTER V

It was hard enough to get Mr. Wilkins to set a definite date for her summer vacation; the time was delayed and juggled till Mrs. Lawrence, who was to have gone with Una, had to set off alone.  But it was even harder for Una to decide where to go for her vacation.

There was no accumulation of places which she had fervently been planning to see.  Indeed, Una wasn’t much interested in any place besides New York and Panama; and of the questions and stale reminiscences of Panama she was weary.  She decided to go to a farm in the Berkshires largely because she had overheard a girl in the Subway say that it was a good place.

When she took the train she was brave with a new blue suit, a new suit-case, a two-pound box of candy, copies of the Saturday Evening Post and the Woman’s Home Companion, and Jack London’s People of the Abyss, which Mamie Magen had given her.  All the way to Pittsfield, all the way out to the farm by stage, she sat still and looked politely at every large detached elm, every cow or barefoot boy.

She had set her methodical mind in order; had told herself that she would have time to think and observe.  Yet if a census had been taken of her thoughts, not sex nor economics, not improving observations of the flora and fauna of western Massachusetts, would have been found, but a half-glad, half-hysterical acknowledgment that she had not known how tired and office-soaked she was till now, when she had relaxed, and a dull, recurrent wonder if two weeks would be enough to get the office poison out of her body.  Now that she gave up to it, she was so nearly sick that she couldn’t see the magic of the sheer green hillsides and unexpected ponds, the elm-shrined winding road, towns demure and white.  She did not notice the huge, inn-like farm-house, nor her bare room, nor the noisy dining-room.  She sat on the porch, exhausted, telling herself that she was enjoying the hill’s slope down to a pond that was yet bright as a silver shield, though its woody shores had blurred into soft darkness, the enchantment of frog choruses, the cooing pigeons in the barn-yard.

“Listen.  A cow mooing.  Thank the Lord I’m away from New York — clean forgotten it — might be a million miles away!” she assured herself.

Yet all the while she continued to picture the office — Bessie’s desk, Mr. Wilkins’s inkwell, the sinister gray scrub-rag in the wash-room, and she knew that she needed some one to lure her mind from the office.

She was conscious that some man had left the chattering rocking-chair group at the other end of the long porch and had taken the chair beside her.

“Miss Golden!” a thick voice hesitated.

“Yes.”

“Say, I thought it was you.  Well, well, the world’s pretty small, after all.  Say, I bet you don’t remember me.”

In the porch light Una beheld a heavy-shouldered, typical American business man, in derby hat and clipped mustache, his jowls shining with a recent shave; an alert, solid man of about forty-five.  She remembered him as a man she had been glad to meet; she felt guiltily that she ought to know him — perhaps he was a Wilkins client, and she was making future difficulty in the office.  But place him she could not.

“Oh yes, yes, of course, though I can’t just remember your name.  I always can remember faces, but I never can remember names,” she achieved.

“Sure, I know how it is.  I’ve often said, I never forget a face, but I never can remember names.  Well, sir, you remember Sanford Hunt that went to the commercial college — ”

“Oh, now I know — you’re Mr. Schwirtz of the Lowry Paint Company, who had lunch with us and told me about the paint company — Mr. Julius Schwirtz.”

“You got me....  Though the fellows usually call me ’Eddie’ — Julius Edward Schwirtz is my full name — my father was named Julius, and my mother’s oldest brother was named Edward — my old dad used to say it wasn’t respectful to him because I always preferred ’Eddie’ — old codger used to get quite het up about it.  Julius sounds like you was an old Roman or something, and in the business you got to have a good easy name.  Say, speaking of that, I ain’t with Lowry any more; I’m chief salesman for the AEtna Automobile Varnish and Wax Company.  I certainly got a swell territory — New York, Philly, Bean-Town, Washi’nun, Balt’more, Cleveland, Columbus, Akron, and so on, and of course most especially Detroit.  Sell right direct to the jobbers and the big auto companies.  Good bunch of live wires.  Some class!  I’m rolling in my little old four thousand bucks a year now, where before I didn’t hardly make more ’n twenty-six or twenty-eight hundred.  Keeps me on the jump alrightee.  Fact.  I got so tired and run-down — I hadn’t planned to take any vacation at all, but the boss himself says to me, ’Eddie, we can’t afford to let you get sick; you’re the best man we’ve got,’ he says, ’and you got to take a good vacation now and forget all about business for a couple weeks.’  ‘Well,’ I says, ’I was just wondering if you was smart enough to get along without me if I was to sneak out and rubber at some scenery and maybe get up a flirtation with a pretty summer girl’ — and I guess that must be you, Miss Golden! — and he laughs and says, ‘Oh yes, I guess the business wouldn’t go bust for a few days,’ and so I goes down and gets a shave and a hair-cut and a singe and a shampoo — there ain’t as much to cut as there used to be, though — ha, ha! — and here I am.”

“Yes!” said Una affably....

Miss Una Golden, of Panama and the office, did not in the least feel superior to Mr. Eddie Schwirtz’s robust commonness.  The men she knew, except for pariahs like Walter Babson, talked thus.  She could admire Mamie Magen’s verbal symphonies, but with Mr. Schwirtz she was able to forget her little private stock of worries and settle down to her holiday.

Mr. Schwirtz hitched forward in his rocker, took off his derby, stroked his damp forehead, laid his derby and both his hands on his stomach, rocked luxuriously, and took a fresh hold on the conversation: 

“But say!  Here I am gassing all about myself, and you’ll want to be hearing about Sandy Hunt.  Seen him lately?”

“No, I’ve lost track of him — you do know how it is in such a big city.”

“Sure, I know how it is.  I was saying to a fellow just the other day, ‘Why, gosh all fish-hooks!’ I was saying, ’it seems like it’s harder to keep in touch with a fellow here in New York than if he lived in Chicago — time you go from the Bronx to Flatbush or Weehawken, it’s time to turn round again and go home!’ Well, Hunt’s married — you know, to that same girl that was with us at lunch that day — and he’s got a nice little house in Secaucus.  He’s still with Lowry.  Good job, too, assistant bookkeeper, pulling down his little twenty-seven-fifty regular, and they got a baby, and let me tell you she makes him a mighty fine wife, mighty bright little woman.  Well, now, say!  How are you getting along, Miss Golden?  Everything going bright and cheery?”

“Yes — kind of.”

“Well, that’s good.  You’ll do fine, and pick up some good live wire of a husband, too — ”

“I’m never going to marry.  I’m going — ”

“Why, sure you are!  Nice, bright woman like you sticking in an office!  Office is no place for a woman.  Takes a man to stand the racket.  Home’s the place for a woman, except maybe some hatchet-faced old battle-ax like the cashier at our shop.  Shame to spoil a nice home with her.  Why, she tried to hold up my vacation money, because she said I’d overdrawn — ”

“Oh, but Mr. Schwirtz, what can a poor girl do, if you high and mighty men don’t want to marry her?”

“Pshaw.  There ain’t no trouble like that in your case, I’ll gamble!”

“Oh, but there is.  If I were pretty, like Rose Larsen — she’s a girl that stays where I live — oh!  I could just eat her up, she’s so pretty, curly hair and big brown eyes and a round face like a boy in one of those medieval pictures — ”

“That’s all right about pretty squabs.  They’re all right for a bunch of young boys that like a cute nose and a good figger better than they do sense — Well, you notice I remembered you, all right, when you went and forgot poor old Eddie Schwirtz.  Yessir, by golly! teetotally plumb forgot me.  I guess I won’t get over that slam for a while.”

“Now that isn’t fair, Mr. Schwirtz; you know it isn’t — it’s almost dark here on the porch, even with the lamps.  I couldn’t really see you.  And, besides, I did recognize you — I just couldn’t think of your name for the moment.”

“Yuh, that listens fine, but poor old Eddie’s heart is clean busted just the same — me thinking of you and your nice complexion and goldie hair and the cute way you talked at our lunch — whenever Hunt shut up and gave you a chance — honest, I haven’t forgot yet the way you took off old man — what was it? — the old stiff that ran the commercial college, what was his name?”

“Mr. Whiteside?” Una was enormously pleased and interested.  Far off and dim were Miss Magen and the distressing Mrs. Lawrence; and the office of Mr. Troy Wilkins was fading.

“Yuh, I guess that was it.  Do you remember how you gave us an imitation of him telling the class that if they’d work like sixty they might get to be little tin gods on wheels like himself, and how he’d always keep dropping his eye-glasses and fishing ’em up on a cord while he was talking — don’t you remember how you took him off?  Why, I thought Mrs. Hunt-that-is — I’ve forgotten what her name was before Sandy married her — why, I thought she’d split, laughing.  She admired you a whole pile, lemme tell you; I could see that.”

Not unwelcome to the ears of Una was this praise, but she was properly deprecatory:  “Why, she probably thought I was just a stuffy, stupid, ugly old thing, as old as — ”

“As old as Eddie Schwirtz, heh?  Go on, insult me!  I can stand it!  Lemme tell you I ain’t forty-three till next October.  Look here now, little sister, I know when a woman admires another.  Lemme tell you, if you’d ever traveled for dry-goods like I did, out of St. Paul once, for a couple of months — nev-er again; paint and varnish is good enough for Eddie any day — and if you’d sold a bunch of women buyers, you’d know how they looked when they liked a thing, alrightee!  Not that I want to knock The Sex, y’ understand, but you know yourself, bein’ a shemale, that there’s an awful lot of cats among the ladies — God bless ’em — that wouldn’t admit another lady was beautiful, not if she was as good-looking as Lillian Russell, corking figger and the swellest dresser in town.”

“Yes, perhaps — sometimes,” said Una.

She did not find Mr. Schwirtz dull.

“But I was saying:  It was a cinch to see that Sandy’s girl thought you was ace high, alrightee.  She kept her eyes glommed onto you all the time.”

“But what would she find to admire?”

“Uh-huh, fishing for compliments!”

“No, I am not, so there!” Una’s cheeks burned delightfully.  She was back in Panama again — in Panama, where for endless hours on dark porches young men tease young women and tell them that they are beautiful....  Mr. Schwirtz was direct and “jolly,” like Panama people; but he was so much more active and forceful than Henry Carson; so much more hearty than Charlie Martindale; so distinguished by that knowledge of New York streets and cafes and local heroes which, to Una, the recent convert to New York, seemed the one great science.

Their rockers creaked in complete sympathy.

The perfect summer man took up his shepherd’s tale: 

“There’s a whole lot of things she’d certainly oughta have admired in you, lemme tell you.  I suppose probably Maxine Elliott is better-looking than what you are, maybe, but I always was crazy over your kind of girl — blond hair and nice, clear eyes and just shoulder-high — kind of a girl that could snuggle down beside a fireplace and look like she grew there — not one of these domineerin’ sufferin’ cats females.  No, nor one of these overdressed New-York chickens, neither, but cute and bright — ”

“Oh, you’re just flattering me, Mr. Schwirtz.  Mr. Hunt told me I should watch out for you.”

“No, no; you got me wrong there.  ’I dwell on what-is-it mountain, and my name is Truthful James,’ like the poet says!  Believe me, I may be a rough-neck drummer, but I notice these things.”

“Oh!...  Oh, do you like poetry?”

Without knowing precisely what she was trying to do, Una was testing Mr. Schwirtz according to the somewhat contradictory standards of culture which she had acquired from Walter Babson, Mamie Magen, Esther Lawrence, Mr. Wilkins’s books on architecture, and stray copies of The Outlook, The Literary Digest, Current Opinion, The Nation, The Independent, The Review of Reviews, The World’s Work, Collier’s, and The Atlantic Monthly, which she had been glancing over in the Home Club library.  She hadn’t learned much of the technique of the arts, but she had acquired an uneasy conscience of the sort which rather discredits any book or music or picture which it easily enjoys.  She was, for a moment, apologetic to these insistent new standards, because she had given herself up to Mr. Schwirtz’s low conversation....  She was not vastly different from a young lady just back in Panama from a term in the normal school, with new lights derived from a gentlemanly young English teacher with poetic interests and a curly mustache.

“Sure,” affirmed Mr. Schwirtz, “I like poetry fine.  Used to read it myself when I was traveling out of St. Paul and got kind of stuck on a waitress at Eau Claire.”  This did not perfectly satisfy Una, but she was more satisfied that he had heard the gospel of culture after he had described, with much detail, his enjoyment of a “fella from Boston, perfessional reciter; they say he writes swell poetry himself; gave us a program of Kipling and Ella Wheeler Wilcox before the Elks — real poetic fella.”

“Do you go to concerts, symphonies, and so on, much?” Una next catechized.

“Well, no; that’s where I fall down.  Just between you and I, I never did have much time for these high-brows that try to make out they’re so darn much better than common folks by talking about motifs and symphony poems and all that long-haired stuff.  Fellow that’s in music goods took me to a Philharmonic concert once, and I couldn’t make head or tail of the stuff — conductor batting a poor musician over the ear with his swagger-stick (and him a union man, oughta kicked to his union about the way the conductor treated him) and him coming back with a yawp on the fiddle and getting two laps ahead of the brass band, and they all blowing their stuffings out trying to catch up.  Music they call that!  And once I went to grand opera — lot of fat Dutchmen all singing together like they was selling old rags.  Aw nix, give me one of the good old songs like ’The Last Rose of Summer.’...  I bet you could sing that so that even a sporting-goods drummer would cry and think about the sweetheart he had when he was a kid.”

“No, I couldn’t — I can’t sing a note,” Una said, delightedly....  She had laughed very much at Mr. Schwirtz’s humor.  She slid down in her chair and felt more expansively peaceful than she ever had been in the stress of Walter Babson.

“Straight, now, little sister.  Own up.  Don’t you get more fun out of hearing Raymond Hitchcock sing than you do out of a bunch of fiddles and flutes fighting out a piece by Vaugner like they was Kilkenny cats?  ’Fess up, now; don’t you get more downright amusement?”

“Well, maybe I do, sometimes; but that doesn’t mean that all this cheap musical comedy music is as good as opera, and so on, if we had our — had musical educations — ”

“Oh yes; that’s what they all say!  But I notice that Hitchcock and George M. Cohan go on drawing big audiences every night — yes, and the swellest, best-dressed, smartest people in New York and Brooklyn, too — it’s in the gallery at the opera that you find all these Wops and Swedes and Lord knows what-all.  And when a bunch of people are out at a lake, say, you don’t ever catch ’em singing Vaugner or Lits or Gryge or any of them guys.  If they don’t sing, ‘In the Good Old Summer-Time,’ it’s ‘Old Black Joe,’ or ‘Nelly Was a Lady,’ or something that’s really got some melody to it.”

The neophyte was lured from her new-won altar.  Cold to her knees was the barren stone of the shrine; and she feebly recanted, “Yes, that’s so.”

Mr. Schwirtz cheerfully took out a cigar, smelled it, bit it, luxuriously removed the band, requested permission to smoke, lighted the cigar without waiting for an answer to that request, sighed happily, and dived again: 

“Not that I’m knocking the high-brows, y’ understand.  This dress-suit music is all right for them that likes it.  But what I object to is their trying to stuff it down my throat!  I let ’em alone, and if I want to be a poor old low-brow and like reg’lar music, I don’t see where they get off to be telling me I got to go to concerts.  Honest now, ain’t that the truth?”

“Oh yes, that way — ”

“All these here critics telling what low-brows us American business men are!  Just between you and I, I bet I knock down more good, big, round, iron men every week than nine-tenths of these high-brow fiddlers — yes, and college professors and authors, too!”

“Yes, but you shouldn’t make money your standard,” said Una, in company with the invisible chorus of Mamie Magen and Walter Babson.

“Well, then, what are you going to make a standard?” asked Mr. Schwirtz, triumphantly.

“Well — ” said Una.

“Understan’ me; I’m a high-brow myself some ways.  I never could stand these cheap magazines.  I’d stop the circulation of every last one of them; pass an act of Congress to make every voter read some A-1, high-class, intellectual stuff.  I read Rev. Henry van Dyke and Newell Dwight Hillis and Herbert Kaufman and Billy Sunday, and all these brainy, inspirational fellows, and let me tell you I get a lot of talking-points for selling my trade out of their spiels, too.  I don’t believe in all this cheap fiction — these nasty realistic stories (like all the author could see in life was just the bad side of things — I tell you life’s bad enough without emphasizing the rotten side, all these unhappy marriages and poverty and everything — I believe if you can’t write bright, optimistic, cheerful things, better not write at all).  And all these sex stories!  Don’t believe in ’em!  Sensational!  Don’t believe in cheap literature of no sort....  Oh, of course it’s all right to read a coupla detective stories or a nice, bright, clean love-story just to pass the time away.  But me, I like real, classy, high-grade writers, with none of this slangy dialogue or vulgar stuff.  ’Specially I like essays on strenuous, modern American life, about not being in a rut, but putting a punch in life.  Yes, sir!”

“I’m glad,” said Una.  “I do like improving books.”

“You’ve said it, little sister....  Say, gee! you don’t know what a luxury it is for me to talk about books and literature with an educated, cultured girl like you.  Now take the rest of these people here at the farm — nice folks, you understand, mighty well-traveled, broad-gauged, intelligent folks, and all that.  There’s a Mr. and Mrs. Cannon; he’s some kind of an executive in the Chicago stock-yards — nice, fat, responsible job.  And he was saying to me, ‘Mr. Schwirtz,’ he says, ’Mrs. C. and I had never been to New England till this summer, but we’d toured every other part of the country, and we’ve done Europe thoroughly and put in a month doing Florida, and now,’ he says, ’I think we can say we’ve seen every point of interest that’s worth an American’s time.’  They’re good American people like that, well-traveled and nice folks.  But books — Lord! they can’t talk about books no more than a Jersey City bartender.  So you can imagine how pleased I was to find you here....  World’s pretty small, all right.  Say, I just got here yesterday, so I suppose we’ll be here about the same length o’ time.  If you wouldn’t think I was presumptuous, I’d like mighty well to show you some of the country around here.  We could get up a picnic party, ten or a dozen of us, and go up on Bald Knob and see the scenery and have a real jolly time.  And I’d be glad to take you down to Lesterhampton — there’s a real old-fashioned inn down there, they say, where Paul Revere stayed one time; they say you can get the best kind of fried chicken and corn on cob and real old-fashioned New England blueberry pie.  Would you like to?”

“Why, I should be very pleased to,” said Una.

Se

Mr. Schwirtz seemed to know everybody at the farm.  He had been there only thirty-six hours, but already he called Mr. Cannon “Sam,” and knew that Miss Vincent’s married sister’s youngest child had recently passed away with a severe and quite unexpected attack of cholera morbus.  Mr. Schwirtz introduced Una to the others so fulsomely that she was immediately taken into the inner political ring.  He gave her a first lesson in auction pinochle also.  They had music and recitations at ten, and Una’s shyness was so warmed away that she found herself reciting, “I’m Only Mammy’s Pickaninny Coon.”

She went candle-lighted up to a four-poster bed.  As she lay awake, her job-branded mind could not keep entirely away from the office, the work she would have to do when she returned, the familiar series of indefinite worries and disconnected office pictures.  But mostly she let the rustle of the breathing land inspirit her while she thought of Mr. Julius Edward Schwirtz.

She knew that he was ungrammatical, but she denied that he was uncouth.  His deep voice had been very kindly; his clipped mustache was trim; his nails, which had been ragged at that commercial-college lunch, were manicured now; he was sure of himself, while Walter Babson doubted and thrashed about.  All of which meant that the tired office-woman was touchily defensive of the man who liked her.

She couldn’t remember just where she had learned it, but she knew that Mr. Schwirtz was a widower.

Se

The fact that she did not have to get up and go to the office was Una’s chief impression at awakening, but she was not entirely obtuse to the morning, to the chirp of a robin, the cluck of the hens, the creak of a hay-wagon, and the sweet smell of cattle.  When she arose she looked down a slope of fields so far away that they seemed smooth as a lawn.  Solitary, majestic trees cast long shadows over a hilly pasture of crisp grass worn to inviting paths by the cropping cattle.  Beyond the valley was a range of the Berkshires with every tree distinct.

Una was tired, but the morning’s radiance inspired her.  “My America — so beautiful!  Why do we turn you into stuffy offices and ugly towns?” she marveled while she was dressing.

But as breakfast was not ready, her sudden wish to do something magnificent for America turned into what she called a “before-coffee grouch,” and she sat on the porch waiting for the bell, and hoping that the conversational Mr. Schwirtz wouldn’t come and converse.  It was to his glory that he didn’t.  He appeared in masterful white-flannel trousers and a pressed blue coat and a new Panama, which looked well on his fleshy but trim head.  He said, “Mornin’,” cheerfully, and went to prowl about the farm.

All through the breakfast Una caught the effulgence of Mr. Schwirtz’s prosperous-looking solidness, and almost persuaded herself that his jowls and the slabs of fat along his neck were powerful muscles.

He asked her to play croquet.  Una played a game which had been respected in the smartest croqueting circles of Panama; she defeated him; and while she blushed and insisted that he ought to have won, Mr. Schwirtz chuckled about his defeat and boasted of it to the group on the porch.

“I was afraid,” he told her, “I was going to find this farm kinda tame.  Usually expect a few more good fellows and highballs in mine, but thanks to you, little sister, looks like I’ll have a bigger time than a high-line poker Party.”

He seemed deeply to respect her, and Una, who had never had the debutante’s privilege of ordering men about, who had avoided Henry Carson and responded to Walter Babson and obeyed chiefs in offices, was now at last demanding that privilege.  She developed feminine whims and desires.  She asked Mr. Schwirtz to look for her handkerchief, and bring her magazine, and arrange her chair cushions, and take her for a walk to “the Glade.”

He obeyed breathlessly.

Following an old and rutted woodland road to the Glade, they passed a Berkshire abandoned farm — a solid house of stone and red timbers, softened by the long grasses that made the orchard a pleasant place.  They passed berry-bushes — raspberry and blackberry and currant, now turned wild; green-gold bushes that were a net for sunbeams.  They saw yellow warblers flicker away, a king-bird swoop, a scarlet tanager glisten in flight.

“Wonder what that red bird is?” He admiringly looked to her to know.

“Why, I think that’s a cardinal.”

“Golly!  I wish I knew about nature.”

“So do I!  I don’t really know a thing — ”

“Huh!  I bet you do!”

“ — though I ought to, living in a small town so long.  I’d planned to buy me a bird-book,” she rambled on, giddy with sunshine, “and a flower-book and bring them along, but I was so busy getting away from the office that I came off without them.  Don’t you just love to know about birds and things?”

“Yuh, I cer’nly do; I cer’nly do.  Say, this beats New York, eh?  I don’t care if I never see another show or a cocktail.  Cer’nly do beat New York.  Cer’nly does!  I was saying to Sam Cannon, ‘Lord,’ I says, ’I wonder what a fellow ever stays in the city for; never catch me there if I could rake in the coin out in the country, no, sir!’ And he laughed and said he guessed it was the same way with him.  No, sir; my idea of perfect happiness is to be hiking along here with you, Miss Golden.”

He gazed down upon her with a mixture of amorousness and awe.  The leaves of scrub-oaks along the road crinkled and shone in the sun.  She was lulled to slumberous content.  She lazily beamed her pleasure back at him, though a tiny hope that he would be circumspect, not be too ardent, stirred in her.  He was touching in his desire to express his interest without ruffling her.  He began to talk about Miss Vincent’s affair with Mr. Starr, the wealthy old boarder at the farm.  In that topic they passed safely through the torrid wilderness of summer shine and tangled blooms.

The thwarted boyish soul that persisted in Mr. Schwirtz’s barbered, unexercised, coffee-soaked, tobacco-filled, whisky-rotted, fattily degenerated city body shone through his red-veined eyes.  He was having a fête champêtre.  He gathered berries and sang all that he remembered of “Nut Brown Ale,” and chased a cow and pantingly stopped under a tree and smoked a cigar as though he enjoyed it.  In his simple pleasure Una was glad.  She admired him when he showed his trained, professional side and explained (with rather confusing details) why the AEtna Automobile Varnish Company was a success.  But she fluttered up to her feet, became the wilful debutante again, and commanded, “Come on, Mr. Slow!  We’ll never reach the Glade.”  He promptly struggled up to his feet.  There was lordly devotion in the way he threw away his half-smoked cigar.  It indicated perfect chivalry....  Even though he did light another in about three minutes.

The Glade was filled with a pale-green light; arching trees shut off the heat of the summer afternoon, and the leaves shone translucent.  Ferns were in wild abundance.  They sat on a fallen tree, thick upholstered with moss, and listened to the trickle of a brook.  Una was utterly happy.  In her very weariness there was a voluptuous feeling that the air was dissolving the stains of the office.

He urged a compliment upon her only once more that day; but she gratefully took it to bed with her:  “You’re just like this glade — make a fellow feel kinda calm and want to be good,” he said.  “I’m going to cut out — all this boozing and stuff — Course you understand I never make a habit of them things, but still a fellow on the road — ”

“Yes,” said Una.

All evening they discussed croquet, Lenox, Florida, Miss Vincent and Mr. Starr, the presidential campaign, and the food at the farm-house.  Boarders from the next farm-house came a-calling, and the enlarged company discussed the food at both of the farm-houses, the presidential campaign, Florida, and Lenox.  The men and women gradually separated; relieved of the strain of general and polite conversation, the men gratefully talked about business conditions and the presidential campaign and food and motoring, and told sly stories about Mike and Pat, or about Ikey and Jakey; while the women listened to Mrs. Cannon’s stories about her youngest son, and compared notes on cooking, village improvement societies, and what Mrs. Taft would do in Washington society if Judge Taft was elected President.  Miss Vincent had once shaken hands with Judge Taft, and she occasionally referred to the incident.  Mrs. Cannon took Una aside and told her that she thought Mr. Starr and Miss Vincent must have walked down to the village together that afternoon, as she had distinctly seen them coming back up the road.

Yet Una did not feel Panama-ized.

She was a grown-up person, accepted as one, not as Mrs. Golden’s daughter; and her own gossip now passed at par.

And all evening she was certain that Mr. Schwirtz was watching her.

Se

The boarders from the two farm-houses organized a tremendous picnic on Bald Knob, with sandwiches and chicken salad and cake and thermos bottles of coffee and a whole pail of beans and a phonograph with seven records; with recitations and pastoral merriment and kodaks snapping every two or three minutes; with groups sitting about on blankets, and once in a while some one explaining why the scenery was so scenic.  Una had been anxious lest Mr. Schwirtz “pay her too marked attentions; make them as conspicuous as Mr. Starr and Miss Vincent”; for in the morning he had hung about, waiting for a game of croquet with her.  But Mr. Schwirtz was equally pleasant to her, to Miss Vincent, and to Mrs. Cannon; and he was attractively ardent regarding the scenery.  “This cer’nly beats New York, eh?  Especially you being here,” he said to her, aside.

They sang ballads about the fire at dusk, and trailed home along dark paths that smelled of pungent leaf-mold.  Mr. Schwirtz lumbered beside her, heaped with blankets and pails and baskets till he resembled a camel in a caravan, and encouraged her to tell how stupid and unenterprising Mr. Troy Wilkins was.  When they reached the farm-house the young moon and the great evening star were low in a wash of turquoise above misty meadows; frogs sang; Una promised herself a long and unworried sleep; and the night tingled with an indefinable magic.  She was absolutely, immaculately happy, for the first time since she had been ordered to take Walter Babson’s dictation.

Se

Mr. Schwirtz was generous; he invited all the boarders to a hay-ride picnic at Hawkins’s Pond, followed by a barn dance.  He took Una and the Cannons for a motor ride, and insisted on buying — not giving, but buying — dinner for them, at the Lesterhampton Inn.

When the debutante Una bounced and said she did wish she had some candy, he trudged down to the village and bought for her a two-pound box of exciting chocolates.  And when she longed to know how to play tennis, he rented balls and two rackets, tried to remember what he had learned in two or three games of ten years before, and gave her elaborate explanations.  Lest the farm-house experts (Mr. Cannon was said by Mrs. Cannon to be one of the very best players at the Winnetka Country Club) see them, Una and Mr. Schwirtz sneaked out before breakfast.  Their tennis costumes consisted of new canvas shoes.  They galloped through the dew and swatted at balls ferociously — two happy dubs who proudly used all the tennis terms they knew.

Se

Mr. Schwirtz was always there when she wanted him, but he never intruded, he never was urgent.  She kept him away for a week; but in their second week Mr. and Mrs. Cannon, Mr. Starr, Miss Vincent, and the pleasant couple from Gloversville all went away, and Una and Mr. Schwirtz became the elder generation, the seniors, of the boarders.  They rather looked down upon the new boarders who came in — tenderfeet, people who didn’t know about Bald Knob or the Glade or Hawkins’s Pond, people who weren’t half so witty or comfy as the giants of those golden, olden days when Mr. Cannon had ruled.  Una and Mr. Schwirtz deigned to accompany them on picnics, even grew interested in their new conceptions of the presidential campaign and croquet and food, yet held rather aloof, as became the ancien regime; took confidential walks together, and in secret laughed enormously when the green generation gossiped about them as though they were “interested in each other,” as Mr. Starr and Miss Vincent had been in the far-forgotten time.  Una blushed a little when she discovered that every one thought they were engaged, but she laughed at the rumor, and she laughed again, a nervous young laugh, as she repeated it to Mr. Schwirtz.

“Isn’t it a shame the way people gossip!  Silly billies,” she said.  “We never talked that way about Mr. Starr and Miss Vincent — though in their case we would have been justified.”

“Yes, bet they were engaged.  Oh, say, did I tell you about the first day I came here, and Starr took me aside, and says he — ”

In their hour-long talks Mr. Schwirtz had not told much about himself, though of his business he had talked often.  But on an afternoon when they took a book and a lunch and tramped off to a round-topped, grassy hill, he finally confided in her, and her mild interest in him as an amiable companion deepened to sympathy.

The book was The People of the Abyss, by Jack London, which Mamie Magen had given to Una as an introduction to a knowledge of social conditions.  Una had planned to absorb it; to learn how the shockingly poor live.  Now she read the first four pages to Mr. Schwirtz.  After each page he said that he was interested.  At the end of the fourth page, when Una stopped for breath, he commented:  “Fine writer, that fella London.  And they say he’s quite a fella; been a sailor and a miner and all kinds of things; ver’ intimate friend of mine knows him quite well — met him in ’Frisco — and he says he’s been a sailor and all kinds of things.  But he’s a socialist.  Tell you, I ain’t got much time for these socialists.  Course I’m kind of a socialist myself lots-a ways, but these here fellas that go around making folks discontented !  Agitators !  Don’t suppose it’s that way with this London — he must be pretty well fixed, and so of course he’s prob’ly growing conservative and sensible.  But most of these socialists are just a lazy bunch of bums that try and see how much trouble they can stir up.  They think that just because they’re too lazy to find an opening, that they got the right to take the money away from the fellas that hustle around and make good.  Trouble with all these socialist guys is that they don’t stop to realize that you can’t change human nature.  They want to take away all the rewards for initiative and enterprise, just as Sam Cannon was saying.  Do you s’pose I’d work my head off putting a proposition through if there wasn’t anything in it for me?  Then, ’nother thing, about all this submerged tenth — these ‘People of the Abyss,’ and all the rest:  I don’t feel a darn bit sorry for them.  They stick in London or New York or wherever they are, and live on charity, and if you offered ’em a good job they wouldn’t take it.  Why, look here! all through the Middle West the farmers are just looking for men at three dollars a day, and for hired girls, they’d give hired girls three and four dollars a week and a good home.  But do all these people go out and get the jobs?  Not a bit of it!  They’d rather stay home and yelp about socialism and anarchism and Lord knows what-all.  ’Nother thing:  I never could figger out what all these socialists and I. W. W.’s, these ‘I Won’t Work’s,’ would do if we did divide up and hand all the industries over to them.  I bet they’d be the very first ones to kick for a return to the old conditions!  I tell you, it surprises me when a good, bright man like Jack London or this fella, Upton Sinclair — they say he’s a well-educated fella, too — don’t stop and realize these things.”

“But — ” said Una.

Then she stopped.

Her entire knowledge of socialism was comprised in the fact that Mamie Magen believed in it, and that Walter Babson alternated between socialism, anarchism, and a desire to own a large house in Westchester and write poetry and be superior to the illiterate mass.  So to the economic spokesman for the Great American Business Man her answer was: 

“But — ”

“Then look here,” said Mr. Schwirtz.  “Take yourself.  S’pose you like to work eight hours a day?  Course you don’t.  Neither do I. I always thought I’d like to be a gentleman farmer and take it easy.  But the good Lord saw fit to stick us into these jobs, that’s all we know about it; and we do our work and don’t howl about it like all these socialists and radicals and other windjammers that know more than the Constitution and Congress and a convention of Philadelphia lawyers put together.  You don’t want to work as hard as you do and then have to divide up every Saturday with some lazy bum of a socialist that’s too lazy to support himself — yes, or to take a bath! — now do you?”

“Well, no,” Una admitted, in face of this triumphant exposure of liberal fallacies.

The book slipped into her lap.

“How wonderful that line of big woolly clouds is, there between the two mountains!” she said.  “I’d just like to fly through them....  I am tired.  The clouds rest me so.”

“Course you’re tired, little sister.  You just forget about all those guys in the abyss.  Tell you a person on the job’s got enough to do looking out for himself.”

“Well — ” said Una.

Suddenly she lay back, her hands behind her head, her fingers outstretched among the long, cool grasses.  A hum of insects surrounded her.  The grasses towering above her eyes were a forest.  She turned her head to watch a lady-bug industriously ascend one side of a blade of grass, and with equal enterprise immediately descend the other side.  With the office always in her mind as material for metaphors, Una compared the lady-bug’s method to Troy Wilkins’s habit of having his correspondence filed and immediately calling for it again.  She turned her face to the sky.  She was uplifted by the bold contrast of cumulus clouds and the radiant blue sky.

Here she could give herself up to rest; she was so secure now, with the affable Mr. Schwirtz to guard her against outsiders — more secure and satisfied, she reflected, than she could ever have been with Walter Babson....  A hawk soared above her, a perfect thing of sun-brightened grace, the grasses smelled warm and pleasant, and under her beat the happy heart of the summer land.

“I’m a poor old rough-neck,” said Mr. Schwirtz, “but to-day, up here with you, I feel so darn good that I almost think I’m a decent citizen.  Honest, little sister, I haven’t felt so bully for a blue moon.”

“Yes, and I — ” she said.

He smoked, while she almost drowsed into slumber to the lullaby of the afternoon.

When a blackbird chased a crow above her, and she sat up to watch the aerial privateering, Mr. Schwirtz began to talk.

He spoke of the flight of the Wright brothers in France and Virginia, which were just then — in the summer of 1908 — arousing the world to a belief in aviation.  He had as positive information regarding aeroplanes as he had regarding socialism.  It seemed that a man who was tremendously on the inside of aviation — who was, in fact, going to use whole tons of aeroplane varnish on aeroplane bodies, next month or next season — had given Mr. Schwirtz secret advices that within five years, by 1913, aeroplanes would be crossing the Atlantic daily, and conveying passengers and mail on regular routes between New York and Chicago....  “Though,” said Mr. Schwirtz, in a sophisticated way, “I don’t agree with these crazy enthusiasts that believe aeroplanes will be used in war.  Too easy to shoot ’em down.”  His information was so sound that he had bought a hundred shares of stock in his customer’s company.  In on the ground floor.  Stock at three dollars a share.  Would be worth two hundred a share the minute they started regular passenger-carrying.

“But at that, I only took a hundred shares.  I don’t believe in all this stock-gambling.  What I want is sound, conservative investments,” said Mr. Schwirtz.

“Yes, I should think you’d be awfully practical,” mused Una.  “My! three dollars to two hundred!  You’ll make an awful lot out of it.”

“Well, now, I’m not saying anything.  I don’t pretend to be a Wisenheimer.  May be nine or ten years — nineteen seventeen or nineteen eighteen — before we are doing a regular business.  And at that, the shares may never go above par.  But still, I guess I’m middlin’ practical — not like these socialists, ha, ha!”

“How did you ever get your commercial training?”

The question encouraged him to tell the story of his life.

Mostly it was a story of dates and towns and jobs — jobs he had held and jobs from which he had resigned, and all the crushing things he had said to the wicked bosses during those victorious resignings....  Clerk in a general store, in a clothing-store, in a hardware-store — all these in Ohio.  A quite excusable, almost laudable, failure in his own hardware-store in a tiny Wisconsin town.  Half a dozen clerkships.  Collector for a harvester company in Nebraska, going from farm to farm by buggy.  Traveling salesman for a St. Paul wholesaler, for a Chicago clothing-house.  Married.  Partner with his brother-in-law in a drug, paint, and stationery store.  Traveling for a Boston paint-house.  For the Lowry Paint Company of Jersey City.  Now with the automobile wax company.  A typical American business career, he remarked, though somehow distinctive, different — A guiding star —

Una listened murmuringly, and he was encouraged to try to express the inner life behind his jobs.  Hesitatingly he sought to make vivid his small-boy life in the hills of West Virginia:  carving initials, mowing lawns, smoking corn silk, being arrested on Hallowe’en, his father’s death, a certain Irving who was his friend, “carrying a paper route” during two years of high school.  His determination to “make something of himself.”  His arrival in Columbus, Ohio, with just seventy-eight cents — he emphasized it:  “just seventy-eight cents, that’s every red cent I had, when I started out to look for a job, and I didn’t know a single guy in town.”  His reading of books during the evenings of his first years in Ohio; he didn’t “remember their titles, exactly,” he said, but he was sure that “he read a lot of them.” ...  At last he spoke of his wife, of their buggy-riding, of their neat frame house with the lawn and the porch swing.  Of their quarrels — he made it clear that his wife had been “finicky,” and had “fool notions,” but he praised her for having “come around and learned that a man is a man, and sometimes he means a lot better than it looks like; prob’ly he loves her a lot better than a lot of these plush-soled, soft-tongued fellows that give ’em a lot of guff and lovey-dovey stuff and don’t shell out the cash.  She was a good sport — one of the best.”

Of the death of their baby boy.

“He was the brightest little kid — everybody loved him.  When I came home tired at night he would grab my finger — see, this first finger — and hold it, and want me to show him the bunny-book....  And then he died.”

Mr. Schwirtz told it simply, looking at clouds spread on the blue sky like a thrown handful of white paint.

Una had hated the word “widower”; it had suggested Henry Carson and the Panama undertaker and funerals and tired men trying to wash children and looking for a new wife to take over that work; all the smell and grease of disordered side-street kitchens.  To her, now, Julius Edward Schwirtz was not a flabby-necked widower, but a man who mourned, who felt as despairingly as could Walter Babson the loss of the baby who had crowed over the bunny-book.  She, the motherless, almost loved him as she stood with him in the same depth of human grief.  And she cried a little, secretly, and thought of her longing for the dead mother, as he gently went on: 

“My wife died a year later.  I couldn’t get over it; seemed like I could have killed myself when I thought of any mean thing I might have said to her — not meaning anything, but hasty-like, as a man will.  Couldn’t seem to get over it.  Evenings were just hell; they were so — empty.  Even when I was out on the road, there wasn’t anybody to write to, anybody that cared.  Just sit in a hotel room and think about her.  And I just couldn’t realize that she was gone.  Do you know, Miss Golden, for months, whenever I was coming back to Boston from a trip, it was her I was coming back to, seemed like, even though I knew she wasn’t there — yes, and evenings at home when I’d be sitting there reading, I’d think I heard her step, and I’d look up and smile — and she wouldn’t be there; she wouldn’t ever be there again....  She was a lot like you — same cute, bright sort of a little woman, with light hair — yes, even the same eye-glasses.  I think maybe that’s why I noticed you particular when I first met you at that lunch and remembered you so well afterward....  Though you’re really a lot brighter and better educated than what she was — I can see it now.  I don’t mean no disrespect to her; she was a good sport; they don’t make ’em any better or finer or truer; but she hadn’t never had much chance; she wasn’t educated or a live wire, like you are....  You don’t mind my saying that, do you?  How you mean to me what she meant — ”

“No, I’m glad — ” she whispered.

Unlike the nimble Walter Babson, Mr. Schwirtz did not make the revelation of his tragedy an excuse for trying to stir her to passion.  But he had taken and he held her hand among the long grasses, and she permitted it.

That was all.

He did not arouse her; still was it Walter’s dark head and the head of Walter’s baby that she wanted to cradle on her breast.  But for Mr. Schwirtz she felt a good will that was broad as the summer afternoon.

“I am very glad you told me.  I do understand.  I lost my mother just a year ago,” she said, softly.

He squeezed her hand and sighed, “Thank you, little sister.”  Then he rose and more briskly announced, “Getting late — better be hiking, I guess.”

Not again did he even touch her hand.  But on his last night at the farm-house he begged, “May I come to call on you in New York?” and she said, “Yes, please do.”

She stayed for a day after his departure, a long and lonely Sunday.  She walked five miles by herself.  She thought of the momently more horrible fact that vacation was over, that the office would engulf her again.  She declared to herself that two weeks were just long enough holiday to rest her, to free her from the office; not long enough to begin to find positive joy.

Between shudders before the swiftly approaching office she thought of Mr. Schwirtz. (She still called him that to herself.  She couldn’t fit “Eddie” to his trim bulkiness, his maturity.)

She decided that he was wrong about socialism; she feebly tried to see wherein, and determined to consult her teacher in ideals, Mamie Magen, regarding the proper answers to him.  She was sure that he was rather crude in manners and speech, rather boastful, somewhat loquacious.

“But I do like him!” she cried to the hillsides and the free sky.  “He would take care of me.  He’s kind; and he would learn.  We’ll go to concerts and things like that in New York — dear me, I guess I don’t know any too much about art things myself.  I don’t know why, but even if he isn’t interesting, like Mamie Magen, I like him — I think!”

Se

On the train back to New York, early Monday morning, she felt so fresh and fit, with morning vigorous in her and about her, that she relished the thought of attacking the job.  Why, she rejoiced, every fiber of her was simply soaked with holiday; she was so much stronger and happier; New York and the business world simply couldn’t be the same old routine, because she herself was different.

But the train became hot and dusty; the Italians began to take off their collars and hand-painted ties.

And hot and dusty, perspiring and dizzily rushing, were the streets of New York when she ventured from the Grand Central station out into them once more.

It was late.  She went to the office at once.  She tried to push away her feeling that the Berkshires, where she had arisen to a cool green dawn just that morning, were leagues and years away.  Tired she was, but sunburnt and easy-breathing.  She exploded into the office, set down her suit-case, found herself glad to shake Mr. Wilkins’s hand and to answer his cordial, “Well, well, you’re brown as a berry.  Have a good time?”

The office was different, she cried — cried to that other earlier self who had sat in a train and hoped that the office would be different.

She kissed Bessie Kraker, and by an error of enthusiasm nearly kissed the office-boy, and told them about the farm-house, the view from her room, the Glade, Bald Knob, Hawkins’s Pond; about chickens and fresh milk and pigeons aflutter; she showed them the kodak pictures taken by Mrs. Cannon and indicated Mr. Starr and Miss Vincent and laughed about them till —

“Oh, Miss Golden, could you take a little dictation now?” Mr. Wilkins called.

There was also a pile of correspondence unfiled, and the office supplies were low, and Bessie was behind with her copying, and the office-boy had let the place get as dusty as a hay-loft — and the stiff, old, gray floor-rag was grimly at its post in the wash-room.

“The office isn’t changed,” she said; and when she went out at three for belated lunch, she added, “and New York isn’t, either.  Oh, Lord!  I really am back here.  Same old hot streets.  Don’t believe there are any Berkshires; just seems now as though I hadn’t been away at all.”

She sat in negligee on the roof of the Home Club and learned that Rose Larsen and Mamie Magen and a dozen others had just gone on vacation.

“Lord! it’s over for me,” she thought.  “Fifty more weeks of the job before I can get away again — a whole year.  Vacation is farther from me now than ever.  And the same old grind....  Let’s see, I’ve got to get in touch with the Adine Company for Mr. Wilkins before I even do any filing in the morning — ”

She awoke, after midnight, and worried:  “I mustn’t forget to get after the Adine Company, the very first thing in the morning.  And Mr. Wilkins has got to get Bessie and me a waste-basket apiece.  Oh, Lord!  I wish Eddie Schwirtz were going to take me out for a walk to-morrow, the old darling that he is — I’d walk anywhere rather than ask Mr. Wilkins for those blame waste-baskets!”

CHAPTER VI

Mrs. Esther Lawrence was, she said, bored by the general atmosphere of innocent and bounding girlhood at the Temperance Home Club, and she persuaded Una to join her in taking a flat — three small rooms — which they made attractive with Japanese toweling and Russian, or at least Russian-Jew, brassware.  Here Mrs. Lawrence’s men came calling, and sometimes Mr. Julius Edward Schwirtz, and all of them, except Una herself, had cigarettes and highballs, and Una confusedly felt that she was getting to be an Independent Woman.

Then, in January, 1909, she left the stiff, gray scrub-rag which symbolized the routine of Mr. Troy Wilkins’s office.

In a magazine devoted to advertising she had read that Mr. S. Herbert Ross, whom she had known as advertising-manager of the Gas and Motor Gazette, had been appointed advertising-manager for Pemberton’s — the greatest manufactory of drugs and toilet articles in the world.  Una had just been informed by Mr. Wilkins that, while he had an almost paternal desire to see her successful financially and otherwise, he could never pay her more than fifteen dollars a week.  He used a favorite phrase of commuting captains of commerce:  “Personally, I’d be glad to pay you more, but fifteen is all the position is worth.”  She tried to persuade him that there is no position which cannot be made “worth more.”  He promised to “think it over.”  He was still taking a few months to think it over — while her Saturday pay-envelope remained as thin as ever — when Bessie Kraker resigned, to marry a mattress-renovator, and in Bessie’s place Mr. Wilkins engaged a tall, beautiful blonde, who was too much of a lady to take orders from Una.  This wrecked Una’s little office home, and she was inspired to write to Mr. S. Herbert Ross at Pemberton’s, telling him what a wise, good, noble, efficient man he was, and how much of a privilege it would be to become his secretary.  She felt that Walter Babson must have been inexact in ever referring to Mr. Ross as “Sherbet Souse.”

Mr. Ross disregarded her letter for ten days, then so urgently telephoned her to come and see him that she took a taxicab clear to the Pemberton Building in Long Island City.  After paying a week’s lunch money for the taxicab, it was rather hard to discover why Mr. Ross had been quite so urgent.  He rolled about his magnificent mahogany and tapestry office, looked out of the window at the Long Island Railroad tracks, and told her (in confidence) what fools all the Gas Gazette chiefs had been, and all his employers since then.  She smiled appreciatively, and tried to get in a tactful remark about a position.  She did discover that Mr. Ross had not as yet chosen his secretary at Pemberton’s, but beyond this Una could find no evidence that he supposed her to have come for any reason other than to hear his mellow wisdom and even mellower stories.

After more than a month, during which Mr. Ross diverted himself by making appointments, postponing them, forgetting them, telephoning, telegraphing, sending special-delivery letters, being paged at hotels, and doing all the useless melodramatic things he could think of, except using an aeroplane or a submarine, he decided to make her his secretary at twenty dollars a week.  Two days later it occurred to him to test her in regard to speed in dictation and typing, and a few other minor things of the sort which her ability as a long-distance listener had made him overlook.  Fortunately, she also passed this test.

When she told Mr. Wilkins that she was going to leave, he used another set of phrases which all side-street office potentates know — they must learn these cliches out of a little red-leather manual....  He tightened his lips and tapped on his desk-pad with a blue pencil; he looked grieved and said, touchingly:  “I think you’re making a mistake.  I was making plans for you; in fact, I had just about decided to offer you eighteen dollars a week, and to advance you just as fast as the business will warrant.  I, uh, well, I think you’re making a mistake in leaving a sure thing, a good, sound, conservative place, for something you don’t know anything about.  I’m not in any way urging you to stay, you understand, but I don’t like to see you making a mistake.”

But he had also told Bessie Kraker that she was “making a mistake” when she had resigned to be married, and he had been so very certain that Una could never be “worth more” than fifteen.  Una was rather tart about it.  Though Mr. Ross didn’t want her at Pemberton’s for two weeks more, she told Mr. Wilkins that she was going to leave on the following Saturday.

It did not occur to her till Mr. Wilkins developed nervous indigestion by trying to “break in” a new secretary who couldn’t tell a blue-print from a set of specifications, that he had his side in the perpetual struggle between ill-paid failure employers and ill-paid ambitious employees.  She was sorry for him as she watched him putter, and she helped him; stayed late, and powerfully exhorted her successor.  Mr. Wilkins revived and hoped that she would stay another week, but stay she could not.  Once she knew that she was able to break away from the scrub-rag, that specter of the wash-room, and the bleak, frosted glass on the semi-partition in front of her desk, no wage could have helped her.  Every moment here was an edged agony.

In this refusal there may have been a trace of aspiration.  Otherwise the whole affair was a hodge-podge of petty people and ignoble motives — of Una and Wilkins and S. Herbert Ross and Bessie Kraker, who married a mattress-renovator, and Bessie’s successor; of fifteen dollars a week, and everybody trying to deceive everybody else; of vague reasons for going, and vaguer reasons for letting Una go, and no reason at all for her remaining; in all, an ascent from a scrub-rag to a glorified soap-factory designed to provide Mr. Pemberton’s daughters-in-law with motors.

So long as her world was ruled by chance, half-training, and lack of clear purpose, how could it be other than a hodge-podge?

Se

She could not take as a holiday the two weeks intervening between the Wilkins office and Pemberton’s.  When she left Wilkins’s, exulting, “This is the last time I’ll ever go down in one of these rickety elevators,” she had, besides her fifteen dollars in salary, one dollar and seventeen cents in the savings-bank.

Mamie Magen gave her the opportunity to spend the two weeks installing a modern filing-system at Herzfeld & Cohn’s.

So Una had a glimpse of the almost beautiful thing business can be.

Herzfeld and Cohn were Jews, old, white-bearded, orthodox Jews; their unpoetic business was the jobbing of iron beds; and Una was typical of that New York which the Jews are conquering, in having nebulous prejudices against the race; in calling them “mean” and “grasping” and “un-American,” and wanting to see them shut out of offices and hotels.

Yet, with their merry eyes, their quick little foreign cries and gestures of sympathy, their laughter that rumbled in their tremendous beards, their habit of having coffee and pinochle in the office every Friday afternoon, their sincere belief that, as the bosses, they were not omniscient rulers, but merely elder fellow-workers — with these un-American, eccentric, patriarchal ways, Herzfeld and Cohn had made their office a joyous adventure.  Other people “in the trade” sniffed at Herzfeld and Cohn for their Quixotic notions of discipline, but they made it pay in dividends as well as in affection.  At breakfast Una would find herself eager to get back to work, though Herzfeld and Cohn had but a plain office in an ugly building of brownstone and iron Corinthian columns, resembling an old-fashioned post-office, and typical of all that block on Church Street.  There was such gentleness here as Una was not to find in the modern, glazed-brick palace of Pemberton’s.

Se

Above railroad yards and mean tenements in Long Island City, just across the East River from New York, the shining milky walls of Pemberton’s bulk up like a castle overtowering a thatched village.  It is magnificently the new-fashioned, scientific, efficient business institution....  Except, perhaps, in one tiny detail.  King Pemberton and his princely sons do not believe in all this nonsense about profit-sharing, or a minimum wage, or an eight-hour day, or pensions, or any of the other fads by which dangerous persons like Mr. Ford, the motor manufacturer, encourage the lazier workmen to think that they have just as much right to rise to the top as the men who have had nerve and foresight.  And indeed Mr. Pemberton may be sound.  He says that he bases wages on the economic law of supply and demand, instead of on sentiment; and how shrewdly successful are he and his sons is indicated by the fact that Pemberton’s is one of the largest sources of drugs and proprietary medicines in the world; the second largest manufactory of soda-fountain syrups; of rubber, celluloid, and leather goods of the kind seen in corner drug-stores; and the third largest manufactory of soaps and toilet articles.  It has been calculated that ninety-three million women in all parts of the world have ruined their complexions, and, therefore, their souls, by Pemberton’s creams and lotions for saving the same; and that nearly three-tenths of the alcohol consumed in prohibition counties is obtained in Pemberton’s tonics and blood-builders and women’s specifics, the last being regarded by large farmers with beards as especially tasty and stimulating.  Mr. Pemberton is the Napoleon of patent medicine, and also the Napoleon of drugs used by physicians to cure the effects of patent medicine.  He is the Shakespeare of ice-cream sodas, and the Edison of hot-water bags.  He rules more than five thousand employees, and his name is glorious on cartons in drug-stores, from Sandy Hook to San Diego, and chemists’ shops from Hong-Kong to the Scilly Isles.  He is a modern Allah, and Mr. S. Herbert Ross is his prophet.

Se

Una discovered that Mr. Ross, who had been negligible as advertising-manager of the Gas and Motor Gazette, had, in two or three years, become a light domestic great man, because he so completely believed in his own genius, and because advertising is the romance, the faith, the mystery of business.  Mr. Pemberton, though he knew well enough that soap-making was a perfectly natural phenomenon, could never get over marveling at the supernatural manner in which advertising seemed to create something out of nothing.  It took a cherry fountain syrup which was merely a chemical imitation that under an old name was familiar to everybody; it gave the syrup a new name, and made twenty million children clamor for it.  Mr. Pemberton could never quite understand that advertising was merely a matter of salesmanship by paper and ink, nor that Mr. Ross’s assistants, who wrote the copy and drew the pictures and selected the mediums and got the “mats” over to the agency on time, were real advertising men.  No, the trusting old pirate believed it was also necessary to have an ordained advertising-manager like Mr. Ross, a real initiate, who could pull a long face and talk about “the psychology of the utilitarian appeal” and “pulling power” and all the rest of the theology.  So he, who paid packing-girls as little as four dollars a week, paid Mr. Ross fifteen thousand dollars a year, and let him have competent assistants, and invited him out to the big, lonely, unhappy Pemberton house in the country, and listened to his sacerdotal discourses, and let him keep four or five jobs at once.  For, besides being advertising-manager for Pemberton’s, Mr. Ross went off to deliver Lyceum lectures and Chautauqua addresses and club chit-chats on the blessings of selling more soap or underwear; and for the magazines he wrote prose poems about stars, and sympathy, and punch, and early rising, and roadside flowers, and argosies, and farming, and saving money.

All this doge-like splendor Una discovered, but could scarcely believe, for in his own office Mr. Ross seemed but as the rest of us — a small round man, with a clown-like little face and hair cut Dutch-wise across his forehead.  When he smoked a big cigar he appeared naughty.  One expected to see his mother come and judiciously smack him.  But more and more Una felt the force of his attitude that he was a genius incomparable.  She could not believe that he knew what a gorgeous fraud he was.  On the same day, he received an advance in salary, discharged an assistant for requesting an advance in salary, and dictated a magazine filler to the effect that the chief duty of executives was to advance salaries.  She could not chart him....  Thus for thousands of years have servants been amazed at the difference between pontiffs in the pulpit and pontiffs in the pantry.

Doubtless it helped Mr. Ross in maintaining his sublimity to dress like a cleric — black, modest suits of straight lines, white shirts, small, black ties.  But he also wore silk socks, which he reflectively scratched while he was dictating.  He was of an elegance in linen handkerchiefs, in a chased-gold cigarette-case, in cigarettes with a monogram.  Indeed, he often stopped during dictation to lean across the enormous mahogany desk and explain to Una how much of a connoisseur he was in tennis, fly-casting, the ordering of small, smart dinners at the Plaza.

He was fond of the word “smart.”

“Rather smart poster, eh?” he would say, holding up the latest creation of his genius — that is to say, of his genius in hiring the men who had planned and prepared the creation.

Mr. Ross was as full of ideas as of elegance.  He gave birth to ideas at lunch, at “conferences,” while motoring, while being refreshed with a manicure and a violet-ray treatment at a barber-shop in the middle of one of his arduous afternoons.  He would gallop back to the office with notes on these ideas, pant at Una in a controlled voice, “Quick — your book — got a’ idea,” and dictate the outline of such schemes as the Tranquillity Lunch Room — a place of silence and expensive food; the Grand Arcade — a ten-block-long rival to Broadway, all under glass; the Barber-Shop Syndicate, with engagement cards sent out every third week to notify customers that the time for a hair-cut had come again.  None of these ideas ever had anything to do with assisting Mr. Pemberton in the sale of soap, and none of them ever went any farther than being outlined.  Whenever he had dictated one of them, Mr. Ross would assume that he had already made a million out of it, and in his quiet, hypnotizing voice he would permit Una to learn what a great man he was.  Hitching his chair an inch nearer to her at each sentence, looking straight into her eyes, in a manner as unboastful as though he were giving the market price of eggs, he would tell her how J. Pierpont Morgan, Burbank, or William Randolph Hearst had praised him; or how much more he knew about electricity or toxicology or frogs or Java than anybody else in the world.

Not only a priest, but a virtuoso of business was he, and Una’s chief task was to keep assuring him that he was a great man, a very great man — in fact, as great as he thought he was.  This task was, to the uneasily sincere Una, the hardest she had ever attempted.  It was worth five dollars more a week than she had received from Troy Wilkins — it was worth a million more!

She got confidence in herself from the ease with which she satisfied Mr. Ross by her cold, canned compliments.  And though she was often dizzied by the whirling dynamo of Pemberton’s, she was not bored by the routine of valeting Mr. Ross in his actual work....  For Mr. Ross actually did work now and then, though his chief duty was to make an impression on old Mr. Pemberton, his sons, and the other big chiefs.  Still, he did condescend to “put his O. K.” on pictures, on copy and proof for magazine advertisements, car cards, window-display “cut-outs,” and he dictated highly ethical reading matter for the house organ, which was distributed to ten thousand drug-stores, and which spoke well of honesty, feminine beauty, gardening, and Pemberton’s.  Occasionally he had a really useful idea, like the celebrated slogan, “Pemberton’s Means PURE,” which you see in every street-car, on every fourth or fifth bill-board.  It is frequent as the “In God We Trust” on our coins, and at least as accurate.  This slogan, he told Una, surpassed “A train every hour on the hour,” or “The watch that made the dollar famous,” or, “The ham what am,” or any of the other masterpieces of lyric advertising.  He had created it after going into a sibyllic trance of five days, during which he had drunk champagne and black coffee, and ridden about in hansoms, delicately brushing his nose with a genuine California poppy from the Monterey garden of R. L. S.

If Mr. Ross was somewhat agitating, he was calm as the desert compared with the rest of Pemberton’s.

His office, which was like a million-dollar hotel lobby, and Una’s own den, which was like the baggage-porter’s den adjoining the same, were the only spots at Pemberton’s where Una felt secure.  Outside of them, fourteen stories up in the titanic factory, was an enormous office-floor, which was a wilderness of desks, toilet-rooms, elevators, waiting-rooms, filing-cabinets.  Her own personality was absorbed in the cosmic (though soapy) personality of Pemberton’s.  Instead of longing for a change, she clung to her own corner, its desk and spring-back chair, and the insurance calendar with a high-colored picture of Washington’s farewell.  She preferred to rest here rather than in the “club-room and rest-room for women employees,” on which Mr. Pemberton so prided himself.

Una heard rumors of rest-rooms which were really beautiful, really restful; but at Pemberton’s the room resembled a Far Rockaway cottage rented by the week to feeble-minded bookkeepers.  Musty it was, with curtains awry, and it must have been of use to all the branches of the Pemberton family in cleaning out their attics.  Here was the old stuffed chair in which Pemberton I. had died, and the cot which had been in the cook’s room till she had protested.  The superstition among the chiefs was that all the women employees were very grateful for this charity.  The room was always shown to exclamatory visitors, who told Mr. Pemberton that he was almost too good.  But in secret conclaves at lunch the girls called the room “the junk-shop,” and said that they would rather go out and sit on the curb.

Una herself took one look — and one smell — at the room, and never went near it again.

But even had it been enticing, she would not have frequented it.  Her caste as secretary forbade.  For Pemberton’s was as full of caste and politics as a Republican national convention; caste and politics, cliques and factions, plots and secrets, and dynasties that passed and were forgotten.

Plots and secrets Una saw as secretary to Mr. Ross.  She remembered a day on which Mr. Ross, in her presence, assured old Pemberton that he hoped to be with the firm for the rest of his life, and immediately afterward dictated a letter to the president of a rival firm in the effort to secure a new position.  He destroyed the carbon copy of that letter and looked at Una as serenely as ever.  Una saw him read letters on the desks of other chiefs while he was talking to them; saw him “listen in” on telephone calls, and casually thrust his foot into doors, in order to have a glimpse of the visitors in offices.  She saw one of the younger Pembertons hide behind a bookcase while his father was talking to his brother.  She knew that this Pemberton and Mr. Ross were plotting to oust the brother, and that the young, alert purchasing agent was trying to undermine them both.  She knew that one of the girls in the private telephone exchange was the mistress and spy of old Pemberton.  All of the chiefs tried to emulate the moyen-age Italians in the arts of smiling poisoning — but they did it so badly; they were as fussily ineffectual as a group of school-boys who hate their teacher.  Not “big deals” and vast grim power did they achieve, but merely a constant current of worried insecurity, and they all tended to prove Mrs. Lawrence’s assertion that the office-world is a method of giving the largest possible number of people the largest possible amount of nervous discomfort, to the end of producing the largest possible quantity of totally useless articles....  The struggle extended from the chiefs to the clerks; they who tramped up and down a corridor, waiting till a chief was alone, glaring at others who were also manoeuvering to see him; they who studied the lightest remark of any chief and rushed to allies with the problem of, “Now, what did he mean by that, do you think?"...  A thousand questions of making an impression on the overlords, and of “House Policy” — that malicious little spirit which stalks through the business house and encourages people to refuse favors.

Una’s share in the actual work at Pemberton’s would have been only a morning’s pastime, but her contact with the high-voltage current of politics exhausted her — and taught her that commercial rewards come to those who demand and take.

The office politics bred caste.  Caste at Pemberton’s was as clearly defined as ranks in an army.

At the top were the big chiefs, the officers of the company, and the heads of departments — Mr. Pemberton and his sons, the treasurer, the general manager, the purchasing-agent, the superintendents of the soda-fountain-syrup factory, of the soap-works, of the drug-laboratories, of the toilet-accessories shops, the sales-manager, and Mr. S. Herbert Ross.  The Olympian council were they; divinities to whom the lesser clerks had never dared to speak.  When there were rumors of “a change,” of “a cut-down in the force,” every person on the office floor watched the chiefs as they assembled to go out to lunch together — big, florid, shaven, large-chinned men, talking easily, healthy from motoring and golf, able in a moment’s conference at lunch to “shift the policy” and to bring instant poverty to the families of forty clerks or four hundred workmen in the shops.  When they jovially entered the elevator together, some high-strung stenographer would rush over to one of the older women to weep and be comforted....  An hour from now her tiny job might be gone.

Even the chiefs’ outside associates were tremendous, buyers and diplomatic representatives; big-chested men with watch-chains across their beautiful tight waistcoats.  And like envoys extraordinary were the efficiency experts whom Mr. Pemberton occasionally had in to speed up the work a bit more beyond the point of human endurance....  One of these experts, a smiling and pale-haired young man who talked to Mr. Ross about the new poetry, arranged to have office-boys go about with trays of water-glasses at ten, twelve, two, and four.  Thitherto, the stenographers had wasted a great deal of time in trotting to the battery of water-coolers, in actually being human and relaxed and gossipy for ten minutes a day.  After the visitation of the expert the girls were so efficient that they never for a second stopped their work — except when one of them would explode in hysteria and be hurried off to the rest-room.  But no expert was able to keep them from jumping at the chance to marry any one who would condescend to take them out of this efficient atmosphere.

Just beneath the chiefs was the caste of bright young men who would some day have the chance to be beatified into chiefs.  They believed enormously in the virtue of spreading the blessings of Pemberton’s patent medicines; they worshiped the house policy.  Once a month they met at what they called “punch lunches,” and listened to electrifying addresses by Mr. S. Herbert Ross or some other inspirer, and turned fresh, excited eyes on one another, and vowed to adhere to the true faith of Pemberton’s, and not waste their evenings in making love, or reading fiction, or hearing music, but to read diligently about soap and syrups and window displays, and to keep firmly before them the vision of fifteen thousand dollars a year.  They had quite the best time of any one at Pemberton’s, the bright young men.  They sat, in silk shirts and new ties, at shiny, flat-topped desks in rows; they answered the telephone with an air; they talked about tennis and business conditions, and were never, never bored.

Intermingled with this caste were the petty chiefs, the office-managers and bookkeepers, who were velvety to those placed in power over them, but twangily nagging to the girls and young men under them.  Failures themselves, they eyed sourly the stenographers who desired two dollars more a week, and assured them that while personally they would be very glad to obtain the advance for them, it would be “unfair to the other girls.”  They were very strong on the subject of not being unfair to the other girls, and their own salaries were based on “keeping down overhead.”  Oldish men they were, wearing last-year hats and smoking Virginia cigarettes at lunch; always gossiping about the big chiefs, and at night disappearing to homes and families in New Jersey or Harlem.  Awe-encircled as the very chiefs they appeared when they lectured stenographers, but they cowered when the chiefs spoke to them, and tremblingly fingered their frayed cuffs.

Such were the castes above the buzzer-line.

Una’s caste, made up of private secretaries to the chiefs, was not above the buzzer.  She had to leap to the rattlesnake tattoo, when Mr. Ross summoned her, as quickly as did the newest Jewish stenographer.  But hers was a staff corps, small and exclusive and out of the regular line.  On the one hand she could not associate with the chiefs; on the other, it was expected of her in her capacity as daily confidante to one of the gods, that she should not be friendly, in coat-room or rest-room or elevator, with the unrecognized horde of girls who merely copied or took the bright young men’s dictation of letters to drug-stores.  These girls of the common herd were expected to call the secretaries, “Miss,” no matter what street-corner impertinences they used to one another.

There was no caste, though there was much factional rivalry, among the slaves beneath — the stenographers, copyists, clerks, waiting-room attendants, office-boys, elevator-boys.  They were expected to keep clean and be quick-moving; beyond that they were as unimportant to the larger phases of office politics as frogs to a summer hotel.  Only the cashier’s card index could remember their names....  Though they were not deprived of the chief human satisfaction and vice — feeling superior.  The most snuffle-nosed little mailing-girl on the office floor felt superior to all of the factory workers, even the foremen, quite as negro house-servants look down on poor white trash.

Jealousy of position, cattishness, envy of social standing — these were as evident among the office-women as they are in a woman’s club; and Una had to admit that woman’s cruelty to woman often justified the prejudices of executives against the employment of women in business; that women were the worst foes of Woman.

To Una’s sympathies, the office proletarians were her own poor relations.  She sighed over the cheap jackets, with silesia linings and raveled buttonholes, which nameless copyists tried to make attractive by the clean embroidered linen collars which they themselves laundered in wash-bowls in the evening.  She discovered that even after years of experience with actual office-boys and elevator-boys, Mr. Ross still saw them only as slangy, comic-paper devils.  Then, in the elevator, she ascertained that the runners made about two hundred trips up and down the dark chutes every day, and wondered if they always found it comic to do so.  She saw the office-boys, just growing into the age of interest in sex and acquiring husky male voices and shambling sense of shame, yearn at the shrines of pasty-faced stenographers.  She saw the humanity of all this mass — none the less that they envied her position and spoke privily of “those snippy private secretaries that think they’re so much sweller than the rest of us.”

She watched with peculiar interest one stratum:  the old ladies, the white-haired, fair-handed women of fifty and sixty and even seventy, spinsters and widows, for whom life was nothing but a desk and a job of petty pickings — mailing circulars or assorting letters or checking up lists.  She watched them so closely because she speculated always, “Will I ever be like that?”

They seemed comfortable; gossipy they were, and fond of mothering the girls.  But now and then one of them would start to weep, cry for an hour together, with her white head on a spotty desk-blotter, till she forgot her homelessness and uselessness.  Epidemics of hysteria would spring up sometimes, and women of thirty-five or forty — normally well content — would join the old ladies in sobbing.  Una would wonder if she would be crying like that at thirty-five — and at sixty-five, with thirty barren, weeping years between.  Always she saw the girls of twenty-two getting tired, the women of twenty-eight getting dry and stringy, the women of thirty-five in a solid maturity of large-bosomed and widowed spinsterhood, the old women purring and catty and tragic....  She herself was twenty-eight now, and she knew that she was growing sallow, that the back of her neck ached more often, and that she had no release in sight save the affably dull Mr. Julius Edward Schwirtz.

Machines were the Pemberton force, and their greatest rivals were the machines of steel and wood, at least one of which each new efficiency expert left behind him:  Machines for opening letters and sealing them, automatic typewriters, dictation phonographs, pneumatic chutes.  But none of the other machines was so tyrannical as the time-clock.  Una admitted to herself that she didn’t see how it was possible to get so many employees together promptly without it, and she was duly edified by the fact that the big chiefs punched it, too....  But she noticed that after punching it promptly at nine, in an unctuous manner which said to all beholders, “You see that even I subject myself to this delightful humility,” Mr. S. Herbert Ross frequently sneaked out and had breakfast....

She knew that the machines were supposed to save work.  But she was aware that the girls worked just as hard and long and hopelessly after their introduction as before; and she suspected that there was something wrong with a social system in which time-saving devices didn’t save time for anybody but the owners.  She was not big enough nor small enough to have a patent cure-all solution ready.  She could not imagine any future for these women in business except the accidents of marriage or death — or a revolution in the attitude toward them.  She saw that the comfortable average men of the office sooner or later, if they were but faithful and lived long enough, had opportunities, responsibility, forced upon them.  No such force was used upon the comfortable average women!

She endeavored to picture a future in which women, the ordinary, philoprogenitive, unambitious women, would have some way out besides being married off or killed off.  She envisioned a complete change in the fundamental purpose of organized business from the increased production of soap — or books or munitions — to the increased production of happiness.  How this revolution was to be accomplished she had but little more notion than the other average women in business.  She blindly adopted from Mamie Magen a half-comprehended faith in a Fabian socialism, a socializing that would crawl slowly through practical education and the preaching of kinship, through profit-sharing and old-age pensions, through scientific mosquito-slaying and cancer-curing and food reform and the abolition of anarchistic business competition, to a goal of tolerable and beautiful life.  Of one thing she was sure:  This age, which should adjudge happiness to be as valuable as soap or munitions, would never come so long as the workers accepted the testimony of paid spokesmen like S. Herbert Ross to the effect that they were contented and happy, rather than the evidence of their own wincing nerves to the effect that they lived in a polite version of hell....  She was more and more certain that the workers weren’t discontented enough; that they were too patient with lives insecure and tedious.  But she refused to believe that the age of comparative happiness would always be a dream; for already, at Herzfeld & Cohn’s she had tasted of an environment where no one considered himself a divinely ruling chief, and where it was not a crime to laugh easily.  But certainly she did not expect to see this age during her own life.  She and her fellows were doomed, unless they met by chance with marriage or death; or unless they crawled to the top of the heap.  And this last she was determined to do.  Though she did hope to get to the top without unduly kicking the shrieking mass of slaves beneath her, as the bright young men learned to do.

Whenever she faced Mr. Ross’s imperturbable belief that things-as-they-are were going pretty well, that “you can’t change human nature,” Una would become meek and puzzled, lose her small store of revolutionary economics, and wonder, grope, doubt her millennial faith.  Then she would again see the dead eyes of young girls as they entered the elevators at five-thirty, and she would rage at all chiefs and bright young men....  A gold-eye-glassed, kitten-stepping, good little thing she was, and competent to assist Mr. Ross in his mighty labors, yet at heart she was a shawled Irish peasant, or a muzhik lost in the vastness of the steppes; a creature elemental and despairing, facing mysterious powers of nature — human nature.

CHAPTER VII

Mr. Julius Edward Schwirtz was a regular visitant at the flat of Mrs. Lawrence and Una.  Mrs. Lawrence liked him; in his presence she abandoned her pretense of being interested in Mamie Magen’s arid intellectualism, and Una’s quivering anxieties.  Mr. Schwirtz was ready for any party, whenever he was “in off the road.”

Una began to depend on him for amusements.  Mrs. Lawrence encouraged her to appear at her best before him.  When he or one of Mrs. Lawrence’s men was coming the two women had an early and quick dinner of cold ham and canned soup, and hastily got out the electric iron to press a frock; produced Pemberton’s Flesh-Tinted Vanisho Powder, and the lip-stick whose use Una hated, but which she needed more and more as she came back from the office bloodless and cold.  They studied together the feminine art of using a new veil, a flower, or fresh white-kid gloves, to change one’s appearance.

Poor Una!  She was thinking now, secretly and shamefacedly, of the “beautifying methods” which she saw advertised in every newspaper and cheap magazine.  She rubbed her red, desk-calloused elbows with Pemberton’s cold-cream.  She cold-creamed and massaged her face every night, standing wearily before a milky mirror in the rather close and lingerie-scattered bedroom, solemnly rotating her fingers about her cheeks and forehead, stopping to conjecture that the pores in her nose were getting enlarged.  She rubbed her hair with Pemberton’s “Olivine and Petrol” to keep it from growing thin, and her neck with cocoanut oil to make it more full.  She sent for a bottle of “Mme. LeGrand’s Bust-Developer,” and spent several Saturday afternoons at the beauty parlors of Mme. Isoldi, where in a little booth shut off by a white-rubber curtain, she received electrical massages, applications of a magic N-ray hair-brush, vigorous cold-creaming and warm-compressing, and enormous amounts of advice about caring for the hair follicles, from a young woman who spoke French with a Jewish accent.

By a twist of psychology, though she had not been particularly fond of Mr. Schwirtz, but had anointed herself for his coming because he was a representative of men, yet after months of thus dignifying his attentions, the very effort made her suppose that she must be fond of him.  Not Mr. Schwirtz, but her own self did she befool with Pemberton’s “Preparations de Paris.”

Sometimes with him alone, sometimes with him and Mrs. Lawrence and one of Mrs. Lawrence’s young businessman attendants, Una went to theaters and dinners and heterogeneous dances.

She was dazzled and excited when Mr. Schwirtz took her to the opening of the Champs du Pom-Pom, the latest potpourri of amusements on Broadway.  All under one roof were a super-vaudeville show, a smart musical comedy, and the fireworks of one-act plays; a Chinese restaurant, and a Louis Quinze restaurant and a Syrian desert-caravan restaurant; a ballroom and an ice-skating rink; a summer garden that, in midwinter, luxuriated in real trees and real grass, and a real brook crossed by Japanese bridges.  Mr. Schwirtz was tireless and extravagant and hearty at the Champs du Pom-Pom.  He made Una dance and skate; he had a box for the vaudeville; he gave her caviar canapé and lobster a la Rue des Trois Soeurs in the Louis Quinze room; and sparkling Burgundy in the summer garden, where mocking-birds sang in the wavering branches above their table.  Una took away an impressionistic picture of the evening —

Scarlet and shadowy green, sequins of gold, slim shoulders veiled in costly mist.  The glitter of spangles, the hissing of silk, low laughter, and continual music quieter than a dream.  Crowds that were not harsh busy folk of the streets, but a nodding procession of gallant men and women.  A kindly cleverness which inspirited her, and a dusky perfume in which she could meditate forever, like an Egyptian goddess throned at the end of incense-curtained aisles.  Great tapestries of velvet and jeweled lights; swift, smiling servants; and the languorous well-being of eating strange, delicious foods.  Orchids and the scent of poppies and spell of the lotos-flower, the bead of wine and lips that yearned; ecstasy in the Oriental pride of a superb Jewess who was singing to the demure enchantment of little violins.  Her restlessness satisfied, a momentary pang of distrust healed by the brotherly talk of the broad-shouldered man who cared for her and nimbly fulfilled her every whim.  An unvoiced desire to keep him from drinking so many highballs; an enduring thankfulness to him when she was back at the flat; a defiant joy that he had kissed her good-night — just once, and so tenderly; a determination to “be good for him,” and a fear that he had “spent too much money on her to-night,” and a plan to reason with him about whisky and extravagance.  A sudden hatred of the office to which she would have to return in the morning, and a stronger, more sardonic hatred of hearing Mr. S. Herbert Ross pluck out his vest-pocket harp and hymn his own praise in a one-man choir, cherubic, but slightly fat.  A descent from high gardens of moonlight to the reality of the flat, where Lawrence was breathing loudly in her sleep; the oily smell of hairs tangled in her old hair-brush; the sight of the alarm-clock which in just six hours would be flogging her off to the mill.  A sudden, frightened query as to what scornful disdain Walter Babson would fling at her if he saw her glorying in this Broadway circus with the heavy Mr. Schwirtz.  A ghostly night-born feeling that she still belonged to Walter, living or dead, and a wonder as to where in all the world he might be.  A defiant protest that she idealized Walter, that he wasn’t so awfully superior to the Champs du Pom-Pom as this astral body of his was pretending, and a still more defiant gratitude to Mr. Schwirtz as she crawled into the tousled bed and Mrs. Lawrence half woke to yawn, “Oh, that — you — Gold’n? Gawd! I’m sleepy.  Wha’ time is ’t?”

Se

Una was sorry.  She hated herself as what she called a “quitter,” but now, in January, 1910, she was at an impasse.  She could just stagger through each day of S. Herbert Ross and office diplomacies.  She had been at Pemberton’s for a year and a third, and longer than that with Mrs. Lawrence at the flat.  The summer vacation of 1909 she had spent with Mrs. Lawrence at a Jersey coast resort.  They had been jealous, had quarreled, and made it up every day, like lovers.  They had picked up two summer men, and Mrs. Lawrence had so often gone off on picnics with her man that Una had become uneasy, felt soiled, and come back to the city early.  For this Mrs. Lawrence had never forgiven her.  She had recently become engaged to a doctor who was going to Akron, Ohio, and she exasperated Una by giving her bland advice about trying to get married.  Una never knew whether she was divorced, or whether the mysterious Mr. Lawrence had died.

But even the difficile Lawrence was preferable to the strain at the office.  Una was tired clean through and through.  She felt as though her very soul had been drained out by a million blood-sucker details — constant adjustments to Ross’s demands for admiration of his filthiest office political deals, and the need of keeping friendly with both sides when Ross was engaged in one of his frequent altercations with an assistant.

Often she could not eat in the evening.  She would sit on the edge of the bed and cry hopelessly, with a long, feeble, peculiarly feminine sobbing, till Mrs. Lawrence slammed the door and went off to the motion pictures.  Una kept repeating a little litany she had made regarding the things she wished people would stop doing — praying to be delivered from Ross’s buoyant egotism, from Mrs. Lawrence’s wearing of Una’s best veils, from Mr. Schwirtz’s acting as though he wanted to kiss her whenever he had a whisky breath, from the office-manager who came in to chat with her just when she was busiest, from the office-boy who always snapped his fingers as he went down the corridor outside her door, and from the elevator-boy who sucked his teeth.

She was sorry.  She wanted to climb.  She didn’t want to be a quitter.  But she was at an impasse.

On a January day the Pemberton office beheld that most terrifying crisis that can come to a hard, slave-driving office.  As the office put it, “The Old Man was on a rampage.”

Mr. Pemberton, senior, most hoarily awful of all the big chiefs, had indigestion or a poor balance-sheet.  He decided that everything was going wrong.  He raged from room to room.  He denounced the new poster, the new top for the talcum-powder container, the arrangement of the files, and the whispering in the amen corner of veteran stenographers.  He sent out flocks of “office memoes.”  Everybody trembled.  Mr. Pemberton’s sons actually did some work; and, as the fire spread and the minor bosses in turn raged among their subordinates, the girls who packed soap down in the works expected to be “fired.”  After a visitation from Mr. Pemberton and three raging memoes within fifteen minutes, Mr. S. Herbert Ross retreated toward the Lafayette Cafe, and Una was left to face Mr. Pemberton’s bear-like growls on his next appearance.

When he did appear he seemed to hold her responsible for all the world’s long sadness.  Meanwhile the printer was telephoning for Mr. Ross’s O. K. on copy, the engravers wanted to know where the devil was that color-proof, the advertising agency sarcastically indicated that it was difficult for them to insert an advertisement before they received the order, and a girl from the cashier’s office came nagging in about a bill for India ink.

The memoes began to get the range of her desk again, and Mr. Pemberton’s voice could be heard in a distant part of the office, approaching, menacing, all-pervading.

Una fled.  She ran to a wash-room, locked the door, leaned panting against it, as though detectives were pursuing her.  She was safe for a moment.  They might miss her, but she was insulated from demands of, “Where’s Ross, Miss Golden?  Well, why don’t you know where he is?” from telephone calls, and from memoes whose polite “please” was a gloved threat.

But even to this refuge the familiar sound of the office penetrated — the whirr which usually sounded as a homogeneous murmur, but which, in her acute sensitiveness, she now analyzed into the voices of different typewriters — one flat, rapid, staccato; one a steady, dull rattle.  The “zzzzz” of typewriter-carriages being shoved back.  The roll of closing elevator doors, and the rumble of the ascending elevator.  The long burr of an unanswered telephone at a desk, again and again; and at last an angry “Well!  Hello?  Yes, yes; this ’s Mr. Jones.  What-duh-yuh want?” Voices mingled; a shout for Mr. Brown; the hall-attendant yelping:  “Miss Golden!  Where’s Miss Golden?  Anything for Sanford?  Mr. Smith, d’you know if there’s anything for Sanford?” Always, over and through all, the enveloping clatter of typewriters, and the city roar behind that, breaking through the barrier of the door.

The individual, analyzed sounds again blended in one insistent noise of hurry which assailed Una’s conscience, summoned her back to her work.

She sighed, washed her stinging eyes, opened the door, and trailed back toward her den.

In the corridor she passed three young stenographers and heard one of them cry:  “Yes, but I don’t care if old Alfalfa goes on a rampage twenty-five hours a day.  I’m through.  Listen, May, say, what d’you know about me?  I’m engaged!  No, honest, straight I am!  Look at me ring!  Aw, it is not; it’s a regular engagement-ring.  I’m going to be out of this hell-hole in two weeks, and Papa Pemberton can work off his temper on somebody else.  Me, I’m going to do a slumber marathon till noon every day.”

“Gee!”

“Engaged!”

— said the other girls, and —

“Engaged!  Going to sleep till noon every day.  And not see Mr. Ross or Mr. Pemberton!  That’s my idea of heaven!” thought Una.

There was a pile of inquiring memoes from Mr. Pemberton and the several department heads on her desk.  As she looked at them Una reached the point of active protest.

“S.  Herbert runs for shelter when the storm breaks, and leaves me here to stand it.  Why isn’t he supposed to be here on the job just as much as I am?” she declaimed.  “Why haven’t I the nerve to jump up and go out for a cup of tea the way he would?  By jiminy!  I will!”

She was afraid of the indefinite menace concealed in all the Pemberton system as she signaled an elevator.  But she did not answer a word when the hall-attendant said, “You are going out, Miss Golden?”

She went to a German-Jewish bakery and lunch-room, and reflectively got down thin coffee served in a thick cup, a sugar-warted Kaffeekuche, and two crullers.  She was less willing to go back to work than she had been in her refuge in the wash-room.  She felt that she would rather be dead than return and subject herself to the strain.  She was “through,” like the little engaged girl.  She was a “quitter.”

For half an hour she remained in the office, but she left promptly at five-thirty, though her desk was choked with work and though Mr. Ross telephoned that he would be back before six, which was his chivalrous way of demanding that she stay till seven.

Mr. Schwirtz was coming to see her that evening.  He had suggested vaudeville.

She dressed very carefully.  She did her hair in a new way.

When Mr. Schwirtz came she cried that she couldn’t go to a show.  She was “clean played out.”  She didn’t know what she could do.  Pemberton’s was too big a threshing-machine for her.  She was tired — “absolutely all in.”

“Poor little sister!” he said, and smoothed her hair.

She rested her face on his shoulder.  It seemed broad and strong and protective.

She was glad when he put his arm about her.

She was married to Mr. Schwirtz about two weeks later.

Se

She had got herself to call him “Ed.” ...  “Eddie” she could not encompass, even in that fortnight of rushing change and bewilderment.

She asked for a honeymoon trip to Savannah.  She wanted to rest; she had to rest or she would break, she said.

They went to Savannah, to the live-oaks and palmettoes and quiet old squares.

But she did not rest.  Always she brooded about the unleashed brutality of their first night on the steamer, the strong, inescapable man-smell of his neck and shoulders, the boisterous jokes he kept telling her.

He insisted on their staying at a commercial hotel at Savannah.  Whenever she went to lie down, which was frequently, he played poker and drank highballs.  He tried in his sincerest way to amuse her.  He took her to theaters, restaurants, road-houses.  He arranged a three days’ hunting-trip, with a darky cook.  He hired motor-boats and motor-cars and told her every “here’s a new one,” that he heard.  But she dreaded his casual-seeming suggestions that she drink plenty of champagne; dreaded his complaints, whiney as a small boy, “Come now, Unie, show a little fire.  I tell you a fellow’s got a right to expect it at this time.”  She dreaded his frankness of undressing, of shaving; dreaded his occasional irritated protests of “Don’t be a finicking, romantic school-miss.  I may not wear silk underclo’ and perfume myself like some bum actor, but I’m a regular guy”; dreaded being alone with him; dreaded always the memory of that first cataclysmic night of their marriage; and mourned, as in secret, for year on year, thousands of women do mourn.  “Oh, I wouldn’t care now if he had just been gentle, been considerate....  Oh, Ed is good; he does mean to care for me and give me a good time, but — ”

When they returned to New York, Mr. Schwirtz said, robustly:  “Well, little old trip made consid’able hole in my wad.  I’m clean busted.  Down to one hundred bucks in the bank.”

“Why, I thought you were several thousand ahead!”

“Oh — oh!  I lost most of that in a little flyer on stocks — thought I’d make a killing, and got turned into lamb-chops; tried to recoup my losses on that damn flying-machine, passenger-carrying game that that — — — — let me in for.  Never mind, little sister; we’ll start saving now.  And it was worth it.  Some trip, eh?  You enjoyed it, didn’t you — after the first couple days, while you were seasick?  You’ll get over all your fool, girly-girly notions now.  Women always are like that.  I remember the first missus was, too....  And maybe a few other skirts, though I guess I hadn’t better tell no tales outa school on little old Eddie Schwirtz, eh?  Ha, ha!...  Course you high-strung virgin kind of shemales take some time to learn to get over your choosey, finicky ways.  But, Lord love you!  I don’t mind that much.  Never could stand for these rough-necks that claim they’d rather have a good, healthy walloping country wench than a nice, refined city lady.  Why, I like refinement!  Yes, sir, I sure do!...  Well, it sure was some trip.  Guess we won’t forget it in a hurry, eh?  Sure is nice to rub up against some Southern swells like we did that night at the Avocado Club.  And that live bunch of salesmen.  Gosh!  Say, I’ll never forget that Jock Sanderson.  He was a comical cuss, eh?  That story of his — ”

“No,” said Una, “I’ll never forget the trip.”

But she tried to keep the frenzy out of her voice.  The frenzy was dying, as so much of her was dying.  She hadn’t realized a woman can die so many times and still live.  Dead had her heart been at Pemberton’s, yet it had secreted enough life to suffer horribly now, when it was again being mauled to death.

And she wanted to spare this man.

She realized that poor Ed Schwirtz, puttering about their temporary room in a side-street family hotel, yawning and scratching his head, and presumably comfortable in suspenders over a woolen undershirt — she realized that he treasured a joyous memory of their Savannah diversions.

She didn’t want to take joy away from anybody who actually had it, she reflected, as she went over to the coarse-lace hotel curtains, parted them, stared down on the truck-filled street, and murmured, “No, I can’t ever forget.”