Part III

Produced by K Nordquist, Jacqueline Jeremy and the Online

Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This

book was produced from scanned images of public domain

material from the Google Print project.)

THE JOB

AN AMERICAN NOVEL

BY

SINCLAIR LEWIS

AUTHOR OF MAIN STREET, BABBITT, ETC.

GROSSET & DUNLAP

PUBLISHERS     NEW YORK

Made in the United States of America

Copyright, 1917, by Harper & Brothers

Printed in the United States of America

Published February, 1917

TO

MY WIFE

WHO HAS MADE "THE JOB" POSSIBLE AND LIFE ITSELF

QUITE BEAUTIFULLY IMPROBABLE

CONTENTS

Page

Part I 3

THE CITY

Part II 133

THE OFFICE

Part III 251

MAN AND WOMAN

Part I

THE CITY

CHAPTER I

Captain Lew Golden would have saved any foreign observer a great deal of

trouble in studying America. He was an almost perfect type of the petty

small-town middle-class lawyer. He lived in Panama, Pennsylvania. He had

never been "captain" of anything except the Crescent Volunteer Fire

Company, but he owned the title because he collected rents, wrote

insurance, and meddled with lawsuits.

He carried a quite visible mustache-comb and wore a collar, but no tie.

On warm days he appeared on the street in his shirt-sleeves, and

discussed the comparative temperatures of the past thirty years with

Doctor Smith and the Mansion House 'bus-driver. He never used the word

"beauty" except in reference to a setter dog--beauty of words or music,

of faith or rebellion, did not exist for him. He rather fancied large,

ambitious, banal, red-and-gold sunsets, but he merely glanced at them as

he straggled home, and remarked that they were "nice." He believed that

all Parisians, artists, millionaires, and socialists were immoral. His

entire system of theology was comprised in the Bible, which he never

read, and the Methodist Church, which he rarely attended; and he desired

no system of economics beyond the current platform of the Republican

party. He was aimlessly industrious, crotchety but kind, and almost

quixotically honest.

He believed that "Panama, Pennsylvania, was good enough for anybody."

This last opinion was not shared by his wife, nor by his daughter Una.

Mrs. Golden was one of the women who aspire just enough to be vaguely

discontented; not enough to make them toil at the acquisition of

understanding and knowledge. She had floated into a comfortable

semi-belief in a semi-Christian Science, and she read novels with a

conviction that she would have been a romantic person "if she hadn't

married Mr. Golden--not but what he's a fine man and very bright and

all, but he hasn't got much imagination or any, well, _romance_!"

She wrote poetry about spring and neighborhood births, and Captain

Golden admired it so actively that he read it aloud to callers. She

attended all the meetings of the Panama Study Club, and desired to learn

French, though she never went beyond borrowing a French grammar from the

Episcopalian rector and learning one conjugation. But in the pioneer

suffrage movement she took no part--she didn't "think it was quite

ladylike." ... She was a poor cook, and her house always smelled stuffy,

but she liked to have flowers about. She was pretty of face, frail of

body, genuinely gracious of manner. She really did like people, liked to

give cookies to the neighborhood boys, and--if you weren't impatient

with her slackness--you found her a wistful and touching figure in her

slight youthfulness and in the ambition to be a romantic personage, a

Marie Antoinette or a Mrs. Grover Cleveland, which ambition she still

retained at fifty-five.

She was, in appearance, the ideal wife and mother--sympathetic,

forgiving, bright-lipped as a May morning. She never demanded; she

merely suggested her desires, and, if they were refused, let her lips

droop in a manner which only a brute could withstand.

She plaintively admired her efficient daughter Una.

Una Golden was a "good little woman"--not pretty, not noisy, not

particularly articulate, but instinctively on the inside of things;

naturally able to size up people and affairs. She had common sense and

unkindled passion. She was a matter-of-fact idealist, with a healthy

woman's simple longing for love and life. At twenty-four Una had half a

dozen times fancied herself in love. She had been embraced at a dance,

and felt the stirring of a desire for surrender. But always a native

shrewdness had kept her from agonizing over these affairs.

She was not--and will not be--a misunderstood genius, an undeveloped

artist, an embryonic leader in feminism, nor an ugly duckling who would

put on a Georgette hat and captivate the theatrical world. She was an

untrained, ambitious, thoroughly commonplace, small-town girl. But she

was a natural executive and she secretly controlled the Golden

household; kept Captain Golden from eating with his knife, and her

mother from becoming drugged with too much reading of poppy-flavored

novels.

She wanted to learn, learn anything. But the Goldens were too

respectable to permit her to have a job, and too poor to permit her to

go to college. From the age of seventeen, when she had graduated from

the high school--in white ribbons and heavy new boots and tight new

organdy--to twenty-three, she had kept house and gone to gossip-parties

and unmethodically read books from the town library--Walter Scott,

Richard Le Gallienne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mrs. Humphry Ward, _How to

Know the Birds_, _My Year in the Holy Land_, _Home Needlework_, _Sartor

Resartus_, and _Ships that Pass in the Night_. Her residue of knowledge

from reading them was a disbelief in Panama, Pennsylvania.

She was likely never to be anything more amazing than a mother and wife,

who would entertain the Honiton Embroidery Circle twice a year.

Yet, potentially, Una Golden was as glowing as any princess of balladry.

She was waiting for the fairy prince, though he seemed likely to be

nothing more decorative than a salesman in a brown derby. She was fluid;

indeterminate as a moving cloud.

Although Una Golden had neither piquant prettiness nor grave

handsomeness, her soft littleness made people call her "Puss," and want

to cuddle her as a child cuddles a kitten. If you noted Una at all, when

you met her, you first noted her gentle face, her fine-textured hair of

faded gold, and her rimless eye-glasses with a gold chain over her ear.

These glasses made a business-like center to her face; you felt that

without them she would have been too childish. Her mouth was as kind as

her spirited eyes, but it drooped. Her body was so femininely soft that

you regarded her as rather plump. But for all her curving hips, and the

thick ankles which she considered "common," she was rather anemic. Her

cheeks were round, not rosy, but clear and soft; her lips a pale pink.

Her chin was plucky and undimpled; it was usually spotted with one or

two unimportant eruptions, which she kept so well covered with powder

that they were never noticeable. No one ever thought of them except Una

herself, to whom they were tragic blemishes which she timorously

examined in the mirror every time she went to wash her hands. She knew

that they were the result of the indigestible Golden family meals; she

tried to take comfort by noticing their prevalence among other girls;

but they kept startling her anew; she would secretly touch them with a

worried forefinger, and wonder whether men were able to see anything

else in her face.

You remembered her best as she hurried through the street in her tan

mackintosh with its yellow velveteen collar turned high up, and one of

those modest round hats to which she was addicted. For then you were

aware only of the pale-gold hair fluffing round her school-mistress

eye-glasses, her gentle air of respectability, and her undistinguished

littleness.

She trusted in the village ideal of virginal vacuousness as the type of

beauty which most captivated men, though every year she was more

shrewdly doubtful of the divine superiority of these men. That a woman's

business in life was to remain respectable and to secure a man, and

consequent security, was her unmeditated faith--till, in 1905, when Una

was twenty-four years old, her father died.

§ 2

Captain Golden left to wife and daughter a good name, a number of debts,

and eleven hundred dollars in lodge insurance. The funeral was scarcely

over before neighbors--the furniture man, the grocer, the polite old

homeopathic doctor--began to come in with bland sympathy and large

bills. When the debts were all cleared away the Goldens had only six

hundred dollars and no income beyond the good name. All right-minded

persons agree that a good name is precious beyond rubies, but Una would

have preferred less honor and more rubies.

She was so engaged in comforting her mother that she scarcely grieved

for her father. She took charge of everything--money, house, bills.

Mrs. Golden had been overwhelmed by a realization that, however slack

and shallow Captain Golden had been, he had adored her and encouraged

her in her gentility, her pawing at culture. With an emerging sincerity,

Mrs. Golden mourned him, now, missed his gossipy presence--and at the

same time she was alive to the distinction it added to her slim

gracefulness to wear black and look wan. She sobbed on Una's shoulder;

she said that she was lonely; and Una sturdily comforted her and looked

for work.

One of the most familiar human combinations in the world is that of

unemployed daughter and widowed mother. A thousand times you have seen

the jobless daughter devoting all of her curiosity, all of her youth, to

a widowed mother of small pleasantries, a small income, and a shabby

security. Thirty comes, and thirty-five. The daughter ages steadily. At

forty she is as old as her unwithering mother. Sweet she is, and

pathetically hopeful of being a pianist or a nurse; never quite

reconciled to spinsterhood, though she often laughs about it; often, by

her insistence that she is an "old maid," she makes the thought of her

barren age embarrassing to others. The mother is sweet, too, and "wants

to keep in touch with her daughter's interests," only, her daughter has

no interests. Had the daughter revolted at eighteen, had she stubbornly

insisted that mother either accompany her to parties or be content to

stay alone, had she acquired "interests," she might have meant something

in the new generation; but the time for revolt passes, however much the

daughter may long to seem young among younger women. The mother is

usually unconscious of her selfishness; she would be unspeakably

horrified if some brutal soul told her that she was a vampire. Chance,

chance and waste, rule them both, and the world passes by while the

mother has her games of cards with daughter, and deems herself

unselfish because now and then she lets daughter join a party (only to

hasten back to mother), and even "wonders why daughter doesn't take an

interest in girls her own age." That ugly couple on the porch of the

apple-sauce and wash-pitcher boarding-house--the mother a mute, dwarfish

punchinello, and the daughter a drab woman of forty with a mole, a wart,

a silence. That charming mother of white hair and real lace with the

well-groomed daughter. That comfortable mother at home and daughter in

an office, but with no suitors, no ambition beyond the one at home. They

are all examples of the mother-and-daughter phenomenon, that most

touching, most destructive example of selfless unselfishness, which robs

all the generations to come, because mother has never been trained to

endure the long, long thoughts of solitude; because she sees nothing by

herself, and within herself hears no diverting voice....

There were many such mothers and daughters in Panama. If they were

wealthy, daughter collected rents and saw lawyers and belonged to a club

and tried to keep youthful at parties. If middle-class, daughter taught

school, almost invariably. If poor, mother did the washing and daughter

collected it. So it was marked down for Una that she should be a

teacher.

Not that she wanted to be a teacher! After graduating from high school,

she had spent two miserable terms of teaching in the small white

district school, four miles out on the Bethlehem Road. She hated the

drive out and back, the airless room and the foul outbuildings, the shy,

stupid, staring children, the jolly little arithmetical problems about

wall-paper, piles of lumber, the amount of time that notoriously

inefficient workmen will take to do "a certain piece of work." Una was

honest enough to know that she was not an honest teacher, that she

neither loved masses of other people's children nor had any ideals of

developing the new generation. But she had to make money. Of course she

would teach!

When she talked over affairs with her tearful mother, Mrs. Golden always

ended by suggesting, "I wonder if perhaps you couldn't go back to

school-teaching again. Everybody said you were so successful. And maybe

I could get some needlework to do. I do want to help so much."

Mrs. Golden did, apparently, really want to help. But she never

suggested anything besides teaching, and she went on recklessly

investing in the nicest mourning. Meantime Una tried to find other work

in Panama.

Seen from a balloon, Panama is merely a mole on the long hill-slopes.

But to Una its few straggly streets were a whole cosmos. She knew

somebody in every single house. She knew just where the succotash, the

cake-boxes, the clothes-lines, were kept in each of the grocery-stores,

and on market Saturdays she could wait on herself. She summed up the

whole town and its possibilities; and she wondered what opportunities

the world out beyond Panama had for her. She recalled two trips to

Philadelphia and one to Harrisburg. She made out a list of openings with

such methodical exactness as she devoted to keeping the dwindling lodge

insurance from disappearing altogether. Hers was no poetic outreach like

that of the young genius who wants to be off for Bohemia. It was a

question of earning money in the least tedious way. Una was facing the

feminist problem, without knowing what the word "feminist" meant.

This was her list of fair fields of fruitful labor:

She could--and probably would--teach in some hen-coop of pedagogy.

She could marry, but no one seemed to want her, except old Henry

Carson, the widower, with catarrh and three children, who called on her

and her mother once in two weeks, and would propose whenever she

encouraged him to. This she knew scientifically. She had only to sit

beside him on the sofa, let her hand drop down beside his. But she

positively and ungratefully didn't want to marry Henry and listen to his

hawking and his grumbling for the rest of her life. Sooner or later one

of The Boys might propose. But in a small town it was all a gamble.

There weren't so very many desirable young men--most of the energetic

ones went off to Philadelphia and New York. True that Jennie McTevish

had been married at thirty-one, when everybody had thought she was

hopelessly an old maid. Yet here was Birdie Mayberry unmarried at

thirty-four, no one could ever understand why, for she had been the

prettiest and jolliest girl in town. Una crossed blessed matrimony off

the list as a commercial prospect.

She could go off and study music, law, medicine, elocution, or any of

that amazing hodge-podge of pursuits which are permitted to small-town

women. But she really couldn't afford to do any of these; and, besides,

she had no talent for music of a higher grade than Sousa and Victor

Herbert; she was afraid of lawyers; blood made her sick; and her voice

was too quiet for the noble art of elocution as practised by several

satin-waisted, semi-artistic ladies who "gave readings" of _Enoch Arden_

and _Evangeline_ before the Panama Study Circle and the Panama Annual

Chautauqua.

She could have a job selling dry-goods behind the counter in the Hub

Store, but that meant loss of caste.

She could teach dancing--but she couldn't dance particularly well. And

that was all that she could do.

She had tried to find work as office-woman for Dr. Mayberry, the

dentist; in the office of the Panama Wood-Turning Company; in the

post-office; as lofty enthroned cashier for the Hub Store; painting

place-cards and making "fancy-work" for the Art Needlework Exchange.

The job behind the counter in the Hub Store was the only one offered

her.

"If I were only a boy," sighed Una, "I could go to work in the

hardware-store or on the railroad or anywhere, and not lose

respectability. Oh, I _hate_ being a woman."

§ 3

Una had been trying to persuade her father's old-time rival, Squire

Updegraff, the real-estate and insurance man, that her experience with

Captain Golden would make her a perfect treasure in the office. Squire

Updegraff had leaped up at her entrance, and blared, "Well, well, and

how is the little girl making it?" He had set out a chair for her and

held her hand. But he knew that her only experience with her father's

affairs had been an effort to balance Captain Golden's account-books,

which were works of genius in so far as they were composed according to

the inspirational method. So there was nothing very serious in their

elaborate discussion of giving Una a job.

It was her last hope in Panama. She went disconsolately down the short

street, between the two-story buildings and the rows of hitched

lumber-wagons. Nellie Page, the town belle, tripping by in canvas

sneakers and a large red hair-ribbon, shouted at her, and Charlie

Martindale, of the First National Bank, nodded to her, but these

exquisites were too young for her; they danced too well and laughed too

easily. The person who stopped her for a long curbstone conference about

the weather, while most of the town observed and gossiped, was the

fateful Henry Carson. The village sun was unusually blank and hard on

Henry's bald spot to-day. _Heavens!_ she cried to herself, in almost

hysterical protest, would she have to marry Henry?

Miss Mattie Pugh drove by, returning from district school. Miss Mattie

had taught at Clark's Crossing for seventeen years, had grown meek and

meager and hopeless. _Heavens!_ thought Una, would she have to be shut

into the fetid barn of a small school unless she married Henry?

"I _won't_ be genteel! I'll work in The Hub or any place first!" Una

declared. While she trudged home--a pleasant, inconspicuous,

fluffy-haired young woman, undramatic as a field daisy--a cataract of

protest poured through her. All the rest of her life she would have to

meet that doddering old Mr. Mosely, who was unavoidably bearing down on

her now, and be held by him in long, meaningless talks. And there was

nothing amusing to do! She was so frightfully bored. She suddenly hated

the town, hated every evening she would have to spend there, reading

newspapers and playing cards with her mother, and dreading a call from

Mr. Henry Carson.

She wanted--wanted some one to love, to talk with. Why had she

discouraged the beautiful Charlie Martindale, the time he had tried to

kiss her at a dance? Charlie was fatuous, but he was young, and she

wanted, yes, yes! that was it, she wanted youth, she who was herself so

young. And she would grow old here unless some one, one of these godlike

young men, condescended to recognize her. Grow old among these streets

like piles of lumber.

She charged into the small, white, ambling Golden house, with its

peculiar smell of stale lamb gravy, and on the old broken couch--where

her father had snored all through every bright Sunday afternoon--she

sobbed feebly.

She raised her head to consider a noise overhead--the faint, domestic

thunder of a sewing-machine shaking the walls with its rhythm. The

machine stopped. She heard the noise of scissors dropped on the

floor--the most stuffily domestic sound in the world. The airless house

was crushing her. She sprang up--and then she sat down again. There was

no place to which she could flee. Henry Carson and the district school

were menacing her. And meantime she had to find out what her mother was

sewing--whether she had again been wasting money in buying mourning.

"Poor, poor little mother, working away happy up there, and I've got to

go and scold you," Una agonized. "Oh, I want to earn money, I want to

earn real money for you."

She saw a quadrangle of white on the table, behind a book. She pounced

on it. It was a letter from Mrs. Sessions, and Una scratched it open

excitedly.

Mr. and Mrs. Albert Sessions, of Panama, had gone to New York. Mr.

Sessions was in machinery. They liked New York. They lived in a flat and

went to theaters. Mrs. Sessions was a pillowy soul whom Una trusted.

"Why don't you," wrote Mrs. Sessions, "if you don't find the kind of

work you want in Panama, think about coming up to New York and taking

stenography? There are lots of chances here for secretaries, etc."

Una carefully laid down the letter. She went over and straightened her

mother's red wool slippers. She wanted to postpone for an exquisite

throbbing moment the joy of announcing to herself that she had made a

decision.

She _would_ go to New York, become a stenographer, a secretary to a

corporation president, a rich woman, free, responsible.

The fact of making this revolutionary decision so quickly gave her a

feeling of power, of already being a business woman.

She galloped up-stairs to the room where her mother was driving the

sewing-machine.

"Mumsie!" she cried, "we're going to New York! I'm going to learn to be

a business woman, and the little mother will be all dressed in satin and

silks, and dine on what-is-it and peaches and cream--the poem don't come

out right, but, oh, my little mother, we're going out adventuring, we

are!"

She plunged down beside her mother, burrowed her head in her mother's

lap, kissed that hand whose skin was like thinnest wrinkly tissue-paper.

"Why, my little daughter, what is it? Has some one sent for us? Is it

the letter from Emma Sessions? What did she say in it?"

"She suggested it, but we are going up independent."

"But can we afford to?... I would like the draymas and art-galleries and

all!"

"We _will_ afford to! We'll gamble, for once!"

CHAPTER II

Una Golden had never realized how ugly and petty were the streets of

Panama till that evening when she walked down for the mail, spurning the

very dust on the sidewalks--and there was plenty to spurn. An old

mansion of towers and scalloped shingles, broken-shuttered now and

unpainted, with a row of brick stores marching up on its once leisurely

lawn. The town-hall, a square wooden barn with a sagging upper porch,

from which the mayor would presumably have made proclamations, had there

ever been anything in Panama to proclaim about. Staring loafers in front

of the Girard House. To Una there was no romance in the sick mansion, no

kindly democracy in the village street, no bare freedom in the hills

beyond. She was not much to blame; she was a creature of action to whom

this constricted town had denied all action except sweeping.

She felt so strong now--she had expected a struggle in persuading her

mother to go to New York, but acquiescence had been easy. Una had an

exultant joy, a little youthful and cruel, in meeting old Henry Carson

and telling him that she was going away, that she "didn't know for how

long; maybe for always." So hopelessly did he stroke his lean brown

neck, which was never quite clean-shaven, that she tried to be kind to

him. She promised to write. But she felt, when she had left him, as

though she had just been released from prison. To live with him, to give

him the right to claw at her with those desiccated hands--she imagined

it with a vividness which shocked her, all the while she was listening

to his halting regrets.

A dry, dusty September wind whirled down the village street. It choked

her.

There would be no dusty winds in New York, but only mellow breezes over

marble palaces of efficient business. No Henry Carsons, but slim, alert

business men, young of eye and light of tongue.

§ 2

Una Golden had expected to thrill to her first sight of the New York

sky-line, crossing on the ferry in mid-afternoon, but it was so much

like all the post-card views of it, so stolidly devoid of any surprises,

that she merely remarked, "Oh yes, there it is, that's where I'll be,"

and turned to tuck her mother into a ferry seat and count the suit-cases

and assure her that there was no danger of pickpockets. Though, as the

ferry sidled along the land, passed an English liner, and came close

enough to the shore so that she could see the people who actually lived

in the state of blessedness called New York, Una suddenly hugged her

mother and cried, "Oh, little mother, we're going to live here and do

things together--everything."

The familiar faces of Mr. and Mrs. Albert Sessions were awaiting them at

the end of the long cavernous walk from the ferry-boat, and New York

immediately became a blur of cabs, cobblestones, bales of cotton, long

vistas of very dirty streets, high buildings, surface cars, elevateds,

shop windows that seemed dark and foreign, and everywhere such a rush of

people as made her feel insecure, cling to the Sessionses, and try to

ward off the dizziness of the swirl of new impressions. She was daunted

for a moment, but she rejoiced in the conviction that she was going to

like this madness of multiform energy.

The Sessionses lived in a flat on Amsterdam Avenue near Ninety-sixth

Street. They all went up from Cortlandt Street in the Subway, which was

still new and miraculous in 1905. For five minutes Una was terrified by

the jam of people, the blind roar through tunneled darkness, the sense

of being powerlessly hurled forward in a mass of ungovernable steel. But

nothing particularly fatal happened; and she grew proud to be part of

this black energy, and contentedly swung by a strap.

When they reached the Sessionses' flat and fell upon the gossip of

Panama, Pennsylvania, Una was absent-minded--except when the Sessionses

teased her about Henry Carson and Charlie Martindale. The rest of the

time, curled up on a black-walnut couch which she had known for years in

Panama, and which looked plaintively rustic here in New York, Una gave

herself up to impressions of the city: the voices of many children down

on Amsterdam Avenue, the shriek of a flat-wheeled surface car, the

sturdy pound of trucks, horns of automobiles; the separate sounds

scarcely distinguishable in a whirr which seemed visible as a thick,

gray-yellow dust-cloud.

Her mother went to lie down; the Sessionses (after an elaborate

explanation of why they did not keep a maid) began to get dinner, and

Una stole out to see New York by herself.

It all seemed different, at once more real and not so jumbled together,

now that she used her own eyes instead of the guidance of that knowing

old city bird, Mr. Albert Sessions.

Amsterdam Avenue was, even in the dusk of early autumn, disappointing in

its walls of yellow flat-buildings cluttered with fire-escapes, the

first stories all devoted to the same sort of shops over and over

again--delicatessens, laundries, barber-shops, saloons, groceries,

lunch-rooms. She ventured down a side-street, toward a furnace-glow of

sunset. West End Avenue was imposing to her in its solid brick and

graystone houses, and pavements milky in the waning light. Then came a

block of expensive apartments. She was finding the city of golden

rewards. Frivolous curtains hung at windows; in a huge apartment-house

hall she glimpsed a negro attendant in a green uniform with a monkey-cap

and close-set rows of brass buttons; she had a hint of palms--or what

looked like palms; of marble and mahogany and tiling, and a flash of

people in evening dress. In her plain, "sensible" suit Una tramped past.

She was unenvious, because she was going to have all these things soon.

Out of a rather stodgy vision of silk opera wraps and suitors who were

like floor-walkers, she came suddenly out on Riverside Drive and the

splendor of the city.

A dull city of straight-front unvaried streets is New York. But she

aspires in her sky-scrapers; she dreams a garden dream of Georgian days

in Gramercy Park; and on Riverside Drive she bares her exquisite breast

and wantons in beauty. Here she is sophisticated, yet eager, comparable

to Paris and Vienna; and here Una exulted.

Down a polished roadway that reflected every light rolled smart motors,

with gay people in the sort of clothes she had studied in

advertisements. The driveway was bordered with mist wreathing among the

shrubs. Above Una shouldered the tremendous façades of gold-corniced

apartment-houses. Across the imperial Hudson everything was enchanted by

the long, smoky afterglow, against which the silhouettes of dome and

tower and factory chimney stood out like an Orient city.

"Oh, I want all this--it's mine!... An apartment up there--a big, broad

window-seat, and look out on all this. Oh, dear God," she was

unconsciously praying to her vague Panama Wesley Methodist Church God,

who gave you things if you were good, "I will work for all this.... And

for the little mother, dear mother that's never had a chance."

In the step of the slightly stolid girl there was a new lightness, a new

ecstasy in walking rapidly through the stirring New York air, as she

turned back to the Sessionses' flat.

§ 3

Later, when the streets fell into order and became normal, Una could

never quite identify the vaudeville theater to which the Sessionses took

them that evening. The gold-and-ivory walls of the lobby seemed to rise

immeasurably to a ceiling flashing with frescoes of light lovers in blue

and fluffy white, mincing steps and ardent kisses and flaunting

draperies. They climbed a tremendous arching stairway of marble, upon

which her low shoes clattered with a pleasant sound. They passed niches

hung with heavy curtains of plum-colored velvet, framing the sly peep of

plaster fauns, and came out on a balcony stretching as wide as the sea

at twilight, looking down on thousands of people in the orchestra below,

up at a vast golden dome lighted by glowing spheres hung with diamonds,

forward at a towering proscenic arch above which slim, nude goddesses in

bas-relief floated in a languor which obsessed her, set free the bare

brown laughing nymph that hides in every stiff Una in semi-mourning.

Nothing so diverting as that program has ever been witnessed. The funny

men with their solemn mock-battles, their extravagance in dress, their

galloping wit, made her laugh till she wanted them to stop. The singers

were bell-voiced; the dancers graceful as clouds, and just touched with

a beguiling naughtiness; and in the playlet there was a chill intensity

that made her shudder when the husband accused the wife whom he

suspected, oh, so absurdly, as Una indignantly assured herself.

The entertainment was pure magic, untouched by human clumsiness, rare

and spellbound as a stilly afternoon in oak woods by a lake.

They went to a marvelous café, and Mr. Sessions astounded them by the

urbanity with which he hurried captains and waiters and 'bus-boys, and

ordered lobster and coffee, and pretended that he was going to be wicked

and have wine and cigarettes.

Months afterward, when she was going to vaudeville by herself, Una tried

to identify the theater of wizardry, but she never could. The Sessionses

couldn't remember which theater it was; they thought it was the Pitt,

but surely they must have been mistaken, for the Pitt was a shanty

daubed with grotesque nudes, rambling and pretentious, with shockingly

amateurish programs. And afterward, on the occasion or two when they

went out to dinner with the Sessionses, it seemed to Una that Mr.

Sessions was provincial in restaurants, too deprecatingly friendly with

the waiters, too hesitating about choosing dinner.

§ 4

Whiteside and Schleusner's College of Commerce, where Una learned the

art of business, occupied only five shabby rooms of crepuscular windows

and perpetually dusty corners, and hard, glistening wall-paint, in a

converted (but not sanctified) old dwelling-house on West Eighteenth

Street. The faculty were six: Mr. Whiteside, an elaborate pomposity who

smoothed his concrete brow as though he had a headache, and took

obvious pride in being able to draw birds with Spencerian strokes. Mr.

Schleusner, who was small and vulgar and _déclassé_ and really knew

something about business. A shabby man like a broken-down bookkeeper,

silent and diligent and afraid. A towering man with a red face, who kept

licking his lips with a small red triangle of tongue, and taught

English--commercial college English--in a bombastic voice of finicky

correctness, and always smelled of cigar smoke. An active young Jewish

New-Yorker of wonderful black hair, elfin face, tilted hat, and smart

clothes, who did something on the side in real estate. Finally, a thin

widow, who was so busy and matter-of-fact that she was no more

individualized than a street-car. Any one of them was considered

competent to teach any "line," and among them they ground out

instruction in shorthand, typewriting, book-keeping, English grammar,

spelling, composition (with a special view to the construction of

deceptive epistles), and commercial geography. Once or twice a week,

language-masters from a linguistic mill down the street were had in to

chatter the more vulgar phrases of French, German, and Spanish.

A cluttered, wheezy omnibus of a school, but in it Una rode to spacious

and beautiful hours of learning. It was even more to her than is the

art-school to the yearner who has always believed that she has a talent

for painting; for the yearner has, even as a child, been able to draw

and daub and revel in the results; while for Una this was the first time

in her life when her labor seemed to count for something. Her

school-teaching had been a mere time-filler. Now she was at once the

responsible head of the house and a seer of the future.

Most of the girls in the school learned nothing but shorthand and

typewriting, but to these Una added English grammar, spelling, and

letter-composition. After breakfast at the little flat which she had

taken with her mother, she fled to the school. She drove into her books,

she delighted in the pleasure of her weary teachers when she snapped out

a quick answer to questions, or typed a page correctly, or was able to

remember the shorthand symbol for a difficult word like "psychologize."

Her belief in the sacredness of the game was boundless.

CHAPTER III

Except for the young man in the bank, the new young man in the

hardware-store, and the proprietors of the new Broadway Clothing Shop,

Una had known most of the gallants in Panama, Pennsylvania, from

knickerbocker days; she remembered their bony, boyish knees and their

school-day whippings too well to be romantic about them. But in the

commercial college she was suddenly associated with seventy entirely new

and interesting males. So brief were the courses, so irregular the

classifications, that there was no spirit of seniority to keep her out

of things; and Una, with her fever of learning, her instinctive common

sense about doing things in the easiest way, stood out among the girl

students. The young men did not buzz about her as they did about the

slim, diabolic, star-eyed girl from Brooklyn, in her tempting low-cut

blouses, or the intense, curly-headed, boyish, brown Jew girl, or the

ardent dancers and gigglers. But Una's self-sufficient eagerness gave a

fervor to her blue eyes, and a tilt to her commonplace chin, which made

her almost pretty, and the young men liked to consult her about things.

She was really more prominent here, in a school of one hundred and

seventy, than in her Panama high school with its enrolment of seventy.

Panama, Pennsylvania, had never regarded Una as a particularly capable

young woman. Dozens of others were more masterful at trimming the

Christmas tree for Wesley Methodist Church, preparing for the annual

picnic of the Art Needlework Coterie, arranging a surprise donation

party for the Methodist pastor, even spring house-cleaning. But she had

been well spoken of as a marketer, a cook, a neighbor who would take

care of your baby while you went visiting--because these tasks had

seemed worth while to her. She was more practical than either Panama or

herself believed. All these years she had, without knowing that she was

philosophizing, without knowing that there was a world-wide inquiry into

woman's place, been trying to find work that needed her. Her father's

death had freed her; had permitted her to toil for her mother, cherish

her, be regarded as useful. Instantly--still without learning that there

was such a principle as feminism--she had become a feminist, demanding

the world and all the fullness thereof as her field of labor.

And now, in this fumbling school, she was beginning to feel the theory

of efficiency, the ideal of Big Business.

For "business," that one necessary field of activity to which the

egotistic arts and sciences and theologies and military puerilities are

but servants, that long-despised and always valiant effort to unify the

labor of the world, is at last beginning to be something more than dirty

smithing. No longer does the business man thank the better classes for

permitting him to make and distribute bread and motor-cars and books. No

longer does he crawl to the church to buy pardon for usury. Business is

being recognized--and is recognizing itself--as ruler of the world.

With this consciousness of power it is reforming its old, petty,

half-hearted ways; its idea of manufacture as a filthy sort of

tinkering; of distribution as chance peddling and squalid shopkeeping;

it is feverishly seeking efficiency.... In its machinery.... But, like

all monarchies, it must fail unless it becomes noble of heart. So long

as capital and labor are divided, so long as the making of munitions or

injurious food is regarded as business, so long as Big Business believes

that it exists merely to enrich a few of the lucky or the well born or

the nervously active, it will not be efficient, but deficient. But the

vision of an efficiency so broad that it can be kindly and sure, is

growing--is discernible at once in the scientific business man and the

courageous labor-unionist.

That vision Una Golden feebly comprehended. Where she first beheld it

cannot be said. Certainly not in the lectures of her teachers, humorless

and unvisioned grinds, who droned that by divine edict letters must end

with a "yours truly" one space to the left of the middle of the page;

who sniffed at card-ledgers as new-fangled nonsense, and, at their most

inspired, croaked out such platitudes as: "Look out for the pennies and

the pounds will look out for themselves," or "The man who fails is the

man who watches the clock."

Nor was the vision of the inspired Big Business that shall be, to be

found in the books over which Una labored--the flat, maroon-covered,

dusty, commercial geography, the arid book of phrases and

rules-of-the-thumb called "Fish's Commercial English," the manual of

touch-typewriting, or the shorthand primer that, with its grotesque

symbols and numbered exercises and yellow pages dog-eared by many

owners, looked like an old-fashioned Arabic grammar headachily perused

in some divinity-school library.

Her vision of it all must have come partly from the eager talk of a few

of the students--the girl who wasn't ever going to give up her job, even

if she did marry; the man who saw a future in these motion pictures;

the shaggy-haired zealot who talked about profit-sharing (which was a

bold radicalism back in 1905; almost as subversive of office discipline

as believing in unions). Partly it came from the new sorts of business

magazines for the man who didn't, like his fathers, insist, "I guess I

can run my business without any outside interference," but sought

everywhere for systems and charts and new markets and the scientific

mind.

§ 2

While her power of faith and vision was satisfied by the largeness of

the city and by her chance to work, there was quickening in Una a shy,

indefinable, inner life of tenderness and desire for love. She did not

admit it, but she observed the young men about her with an interest that

was as diverting as her ambition.

At first they awed her by their number and their strangeness. But when

she seemed to be quite their equal in this school of the timorously

clerical, she began to look at them level-eyed.... A busy, commonplace,

soft-armed, pleasant, good little thing she was; glancing at them

through eye-glasses attached to a gold chain over her ear, not much

impressed now, slightly ashamed by the delight she took in winning their

attention by brilliant recitations.... She decided that most of them

were earnest-minded but intelligent serfs, not much stronger than the

girls who were taking stenography for want of anything better to do.

They sprawled and looked vacuous as they worked in rows in the big

study-hall, with its hard blue walls showing the marks of two removed

partitions, its old iron fireplace stuffed with rubbers and overshoes

and crayon-boxes. As a provincial, Una disliked the many Jews among

them, and put down their fervor for any sort of learning to

acquisitiveness. The rest she came to despise for the clumsy slowness

with which they learned even the simplest lessons. And to all of them

she--who was going to be rich and powerful, directly she was good for

one hundred words a minute at stenography!--felt disdainfully superior,

because they were likely to be poor the rest of their lives.

In a twilight walk on Washington Heights, a walk of such vigor and happy

absorption with new problems as she had never known in Panama, she

caught herself being contemptuous about their frayed poverty. With a

sharp emotional sincerity, she rebuked herself for such sordidness,

mocked herself for assuming that she was already rich.

Even out of this mass of clerklings emerged two or three who were

interesting: Sam Weintraub, a young, active, red-headed, slim-waisted

Jew, who was born in Brooklyn. He smoked large cigars with an air, knew

how to wear his clothes, and told about playing tennis at the Prospect

Athletic Club. He would be a smart secretary or confidential clerk some

day, Una was certain; he would own a car and be seen in evening clothes

and even larger cigars at after-theater suppers. She was rather in awe

of his sophistication. He was the only man who made her feel like a

Freshman.

J. J. Todd, a reticent, hesitating, hard-working man of thirty, from

Chatham on Cape Cod. It was he who, in noon-time arguments, grimly

advocated profit-sharing, which Sam Weintraub debonairly dismissed as

"socialistic."

And, most appealing to her, enthusiastic young Sanford Hunt,

inarticulate, but longing for a chance to attach himself to some master.

Weintraub and Todd had desks on either side of her; they had that great

romantic virtue, propinquity. But Sanford Hunt she had noticed, in his

corner across the room, because he glanced about with such boyish

loneliness.

Sanford Hunt helped her find a rubber in the high-school-like coat-room

on a rainy day when the girls were giggling and the tremendous swells of

the institution were whooping and slapping one another on the back and

acting as much as possible like their ideal of college men--an ideal

presumably derived from motion pictures and college playlets in

vaudeville. Una saw J. J. Todd gawping at her, but not offering to help,

while a foreshortened Sanford groped along the floor, under the dusty

line of coats, for her missing left rubber. Sanford came up with the

rubber, smiled like a nice boy, and walked with her to the Subway.

He didn't need much encouragement to tell his ambitions. He was

twenty-one--three years younger than herself. He was a semi-orphan, born

in Newark; had worked up from office-boy to clerk in the office of a

huge Jersey City paint company; had saved money to take a commercial

course; was going back to the paint company, and hoped to be

office-manager there. He had a conviction that "the finest man in the

world" was Mr. Claude Lowry, president of the Lowry Paint Company; the

next finest, Mr. Ernest Lowry, vice-president and general manager; the

next, Mr. Julius Schwirtz, one of the two city salesmen--Mr. Schwirtz

having occupied a desk next to his own for two years--and that "_the_

best paint on the market to-day is Lowry's Lasting Paint--simply no

getting around it."

In the five-minute walk over to the Eighteenth Street station of the

Subway, Sanford had lastingly impressed Una by his devotion to the job;

eager and faithful as the glory that a young subaltern takes in his

regiment. She agreed with him that the dour J. J. Todd was "crazy" in

his theories about profit-sharing and selling stocks to employees. While

she was with young Sanford, Una found herself concurring that "the

bosses know so much better about all those things--gee whiz! they've had

so much more experience--besides you can't expect them to give away all

their profits to please these walking delegates or a Cape Cod farmer

like Todd! All these theories don't do a fellow any good; what he wants

is to stick on a job and make good."

Though, in keeping with the general school-boyishness of the

institution, the study-room supervisors tried to prevent conversation,

there was always a current of whispering and low talk, and Sam Weintraub

gave Una daily reports of the tennis, the dances, the dinners at the

Prospect Athletic Club. Her evident awe of his urban amusements pleased

him. He told his former idol, the slim, blond giggler, that she was

altogether too fresh for a Bronx Kid, and he basked in Una's admiration.

Through him she had a revelation of the New York in which people

actually were born, which they took casually, as she did Panama.

She tried consciously to become a real New-Yorker herself. After

lunch--her home-made lunch of sandwiches and an apple--which she ate in

the buzzing, gossiping study-hall at noon-hour, she explored the city.

Sometimes Sanford Hunt begged to go with her. Once Todd stalked along

and embarrassed her by being indignant over an anti-socialist orator in

Madison Square. Once, on Fifth Avenue, she met Sam Weintraub, and he

nonchalantly pointed out, in a passing motor, a man whom he declared to

be John D. Rockefeller.

Even at lunch-hour Una could not come to much understanding with the

girls of the commercial college. They seemed alternately third-rate

stenographers, and very haughty urbanites who knew all about "fellows"

and "shows" and "glad rags." Except for good-natured, square-rigged Miss

Moynihan, and the oldish, anxious, industrious Miss Ingalls, who, like

Una, came from a small town, and the adorably pretty little Miss Moore,

whom you couldn't help loving, Una saw the girls of the school only in a

mass.

It was Sam Weintraub, J. J. Todd, and Sanford Hunt whom Una watched and

liked, and of whom she thought when the school authorities pompously

invited them all to a dance early in November.

§ 3

The excitement, the giggles, the discussions of girdles and slippers and

hair-waving and men, which filled the study-hall at noon and the

coat-room at closing hour, was like midnight silence compared with the

tumult in Una's breast when she tried to make herself believe that

either her blue satin evening dress or her white-and-pink frock of

"novelty crêpe" was attractive enough for the occasion. The crêpe was

the older, but she had worn the blue satin so much that now the crêpe

suddenly seemed the newer, the less soiled. After discussions with her

mother, which involved much holding up of the crêpe and the tracing of

imaginary diagrams with a forefinger, she decided to put a new velvet

girdle and new sleeve ruffles on the crêpe, and then she said, "It will

have to do."

Very different is the dressing of the girl who isn't quite pretty, nor

at all rich, from the luxurious joy which the beautiful woman takes in

her new toilettes. Instead of the faint, shivery wonder as to whether

men will realize how exquisitely the line of a new bodice accentuates

the molding of her neck, the unpretty girl hopes that no one will

observe how unevenly her dress hangs, how pointed and red and rough are

her elbows, how clumsily waved her hair. "I don't think anybody will

notice," she sighs, and is contemptuously conscious of her own stolid,

straight, healthy waist, while her mother flutters about and pretends to

believe that she is curved like a houri, like Helen of Troy, like Isolde

at eighteen.

Una was touched by her mother's sincere eagerness in trying to make her

pretty. Poor little mother. It had been hard on her to sit alone all day

in a city flat, with no Panama neighbors to drop in on her, no meeting

of the Panama Study Club, and with Una bringing home her books to work

aloof all evening.

The day before the dance, J. J. Todd dourly asked her if he might call

for her and take her home. Una accepted hesitatingly. As she did so, she

unconsciously glanced at the decorative Sam Weintraub, who was rocking

on his toes and flirting with Miss Moore, the kittenish belle of the

school.

She must have worried for fifteen minutes over the question of whether

she was going to wear a hat or a scarf, trying to remember the best

social precedents of Panama as laid down by Mrs. Dr. Smith, trying to

recall New York women as she had once or twice seen them in the evening

on Broadway. Finally, she jerked a pale-blue chiffon scarf over her

mildly pretty hair, pulled on her new long, white kid gloves, noted

miserably that the gloves did not quite cover her pebbly elbows, and

snapped at her fussing mother: "Oh, it doesn't matter. I'm a perfect

sight, anyway, so what's the use of worrying!"

Her mother looked so hurt and bewildered that Una pulled her down into a

chair, and, kneeling on the floor with her arms about her, crooned, "Oh,

I'm just nervous, mumsie dear; working so hard and all. I'll have the

best time, now you've made me so pretty for the dance." Clasped thus, an

intense brooding affection holding them and seeming to fill the shabby

sitting-room, they waited for the coming of her Tristan, her chevalier,

the flat-footed J. J. Todd.

They heard Todd shamble along the hall. They wriggled with concealed

laughter and held each other tighter when he stopped at the door of the

flat and blew his nervous nose in a tremendous blast.... More vulgar

possibly than the trumpetry which heralded the arrival of Lancelot at a

château, but on the whole quite as effective.

She set out with him, observing his pitiful, home-cleaned, black

sack-suit, and home-shined, expansive, black boots and ready-made tie,

while he talked easily, and was merely rude about dances and clothes and

the weather.

In the study-hall, which had been cleared of all seats except for a

fringe along the walls, and was unevenly hung with school flags and

patriotic bunting, Una found the empty-headed time-servers, the Little

Folk, to whom she was so superior in the class-room. Brooklyn Jews used

to side-street dance-halls, Bronx girls who went to the bartenders'

ball, and the dinner and grand ball of the Clamchowder Twenty, they

laughed and talked and danced--all three at once--with an ease which

dismayed her.

To Una Golden, of Panama, the waltz and the two-step were solemn

affairs. She could make her feet go in a one-two-three triangle with

approximate accuracy, if she didn't take any liberties with them. She

was relieved to find that Todd danced with a heavy accuracy which kept

her from stumbling.... But their performance was solemn and joyless,

while by her skipped Sam Weintraub, in evening clothes with black velvet

collar and cuffs, swinging and making fantastic dips with the lovely

Miss Moore, who cuddled into his arms and swayed to his swing.

"Let's cut out the next," said Todd, and she consented, though Sanford

Hunt came boyishly, blushingly up to ask her for a dance.... She was

intensely aware that she was a wall-flower, in a row with the anxious

Miss Ingalls and the elderly frump, Miss Fisle. Sam Weintraub seemed to

avoid her, and, though she tried to persuade herself that his greasy,

curly, red hair and his pride of evening clothes and sharp face were

blatantly Jewish, she knew that she admired his atmosphere of

gorgeousness and was in despair at being shut out of it. She even feared

that Sanford Hunt hadn't really wanted to dance with her, and she

wilfully ignored his frequent glances of friendliness and his efforts to

introduce her and his "lady friend." She was silent and hard, while poor

Todd, trying not to be a radical and lecture on single-tax or municipal

ownership, attempted to be airy about the theater, which meant the one

show he had seen since he had come to New York.

From vague dissatisfaction she drifted into an active resentment at

being shut out of the world of pretty things, of clinging gowns and

graceful movement and fragrant rooms. While Todd was taking her home she

was saying to herself over and over, "Nope; it's just as bad as parties

at Panama. Never really enjoyed 'em. I'm out of it. I'll stick to my

work. Oh, drat it!"

§ 4

Blindly, in a daily growing faith in her commercial future, she shut out

the awkward gaieties of the school, ignored Todd and Sanford Hunt and

Sam Weintraub, made no effort to cultivate the adorable Miss Moore's

rather flattering friendliness for her. She was like a girl grind in a

coeducational college who determines to head the class and to that

devotes all of a sexless energy.

Only Una was not sexless. Though she hadn't the dancing-girl's oblivious

delight in pleasure, though her energetic common sense and willingness

to serve had turned into a durable plodding, Una was alive, normal,

desirous of love, as the flower-faced girl grind of the college so often

is not, to the vast confusion of numerous ardent young gentlemen.

She could not long forbid herself an interest in Sanford Hunt and Sam

Weintraub; she even idealized Todd as a humble hero, a self-made and

honest man, which he was, though Una considered herself highly

charitable to him.

Sweet to her--even when he told her that he was engaged, even when it

was evident that he regarded her as an older sister or as a very young

and understanding aunt--was Sanford Hunt's liking. "Why do you like

me--if you do?" she demanded one lunch-hour, when he had brought her a

bar of milk-chocolate.

"Oh, I dun'no'; you're so darn honest, and you got so much more sense

than this bunch of Bronx totties. Gee! they'll make bum stenogs. I know.

I've worked in an office. They'll keep their gum and a looking-glass in

the upper right-hand drawer of their typewriter desks, and the old man

will call them down eleventy times a day, and they'll marry the

shipping-clerk first time he sneaks out from behind a box. But you got

sense, and somehow--gee! I never know how to express things--glad I'm

taking this English composition stuff--oh, you just seem to understand a

guy. I never liked that Yid Weintraub till you made me see how darn

clever and nice he really is, even if he does wear spats."

Sanford told her often that he wished she was going to come over to the

Lowry Paint Company to work, when she finished. He had entered the

college before her; he would be through somewhat earlier; he was going

back to the paint company and would try to find an opening for her

there. He wanted her to meet Mr. Julius Edward Schwirtz, the Manhattan

salesman of the company.

When Mr. Schwirtz was in that part of town, interviewing the

department-store buyers, he called up Sanford Hunt, and Sanford insisted

that she come out to lunch with Schwirtz and himself and his girl. She

went shyly.

Sanford's sweetheart proved to be as clean and sweet as himself, but

mute, smiling instead of speaking, inclined to admire every one, without

much discrimination. Sanford was very proud, very eager as host, and his

boyish admiration of all his guests gave a certain charm to the corner

of the crude German sausage-and-schnitzel restaurant where they lunched.

Una worked at making the party as successful as possible, and was

cordial to Mr. Julius Edward Schwirtz, the paint salesman.

Mr. Schwirtz was forty or forty-one, a red-faced, clipped-mustached,

derby-hatted average citizen. He was ungrammatical and jocose; he panted

a good deal and gurgled his soup; his nails were ragged-edged, his

stupid brown tie uneven, and there were signs of a growing grossness and

fatty unwieldiness about his neck, his shoulders, his waist. But he was

affable. He quietly helped Sanford in ordering lunch, to the great

economy of embarrassment. He was smilingly ready to explain to Una how a

paint company office was run; what chances there were for a girl. He

seemed to know his business, he didn't gossip, and his heavy,

coarse-lipped smile was almost sweet when he said to Una, "Makes a

hard-cased old widower like me pretty lonely to see this nice kid and

girly here. Eh? Wish I had some children like them myself."

He wasn't vastly different from Henry Carson, this Mr. Schwirtz, but he

had a mechanical city smartness in his manner and a jocular energy which

the stringy-necked Henry quite lacked.

Because she liked to be with Sanford Hunt, hoped to get from Mr. Julius

Edward Schwirtz still more of the feeling of how actual business men do

business, she hoped for another lunch.

But a crisis unexpected and alarming came to interrupt her happy

progress to a knowledge of herself and men.

§ 5

The Goldens had owned no property in Panama, Pennsylvania; they had

rented their house. Captain Lew Golden, who was so urgent in advising

others to purchase real estate--with a small, justifiable commission to

himself--had never quite found time to decide on his own real-estate

investments. When they had come to New York, Una and her mother had

given up the house and sold the heavier furniture, the big beds, the

stove. The rest of the furniture they had brought to the city and

installed in a little flat way up on 148th Street.

Her mother was, Una declared, so absolutely the lady that it was a

crying shame to think of her immured here in their elevatorless

tenement; this new, clean, barren building of yellow brick, its face

broken out with fire-escapes. It had narrow halls, stairs of slate

treads and iron rails, and cheap wooden doorways which had begun to warp

the minute the structure was finished--and sold. The bright-green burlap

wall-covering in the hallways had faded in less than a year to the color

of dry grass. The janitor grew tired every now and then. He had been

markedly diligent at first, but he was already giving up the task of

keeping the building clean. It was one of, and typical of, a mile of

yellow brick tenements; it was named after an African orchid of great

loveliness, and it was filled with clerks, motormen, probationer

policemen, and enormously prolific women in dressing-sacques.

The Goldens had three rooms and bath. A small linoleous gas-stove

kitchen. A bedroom with standing wardrobe, iron bed, and just one

graceful piece of furniture--Una's dressing-table; a room pervasively

feminine in its scent and in the little piles of lingerie which Mrs.

Golden affected more, not less, as she grew older. The living-room, with

stiff, brown, woolen brocade chairs, transplanted from their Panama

home, a red plush sofa, two large oak-framed Biblical pictures--"The

Wedding-feast at Cana," and "Solomon in His Temple." This living-room

had never been changed since the day of their moving in. Una repeatedly

coveted the German color-prints she saw in shop windows, but she had to

economize.

She planned that when she should succeed they would have such an

apartment of white enamel and glass doors and mahogany as she saw

described in the women's magazines. She realized mentally that her

mother must be lonely in the long hours of waiting for her return, but

she who was busy all day could never feel emotionally how great was that

loneliness, and she expected her mother to be satisfied with the future.

Quite suddenly, a couple of weeks after the dance, when they were

talking about the looming topic--what kind of work Una would be able to

get when she should have completed school--her mother fell violently

a-weeping; sobbed, "Oh, Una baby, I want to go home. I'm so lonely

here--just nobody but you and the Sessionses. Can't we go back to

Panama? You don't seem to really know what you _are_ going to do."

"Why, mother--"

Una loved her mother, yet she felt a grim disgust, rather than pity....

Just when she had been working so hard! And for her mother as much as

for herself.... She stalked over to the table, severely rearranged the

magazines, slammed down a newspaper, and turned, angrily. "Why, can't

you see? I _can't_ give up my work now."

"Couldn't you get something to do in Panama, dearie?"

"You know perfectly well that I tried."

"But maybe now, with your college course and all--even if it took a

little longer to get something there, we'd be right among the folks we

know--"

"Mother, can't you understand that we have only a little over three

hundred dollars now? If we moved again and everything, we wouldn't have

two hundred dollars to live on. Haven't you _any_ sense of finances?"

"You must not talk to me that way, my daughter!"

A slim, fine figure of hurt-dignity, Mrs. Golden left the room, lay down

in the bedroom, her face away from the door where Una stood in

perplexity. Una ran to her, kissed her shoulder, begged for forgiveness.

Her mother patted her cheek, and sobbed, "Oh, it doesn't matter," in a

tone so forlorn and lonely that it did matter, terribly. The sadness of

it tortured Una while she was realizing that her mother had lost all

practical comprehension of the details of life, was become a child,

trusting everything to her daughter, yet retaining a power of suffering

such as no child can know.

It had been easy to bring her mother here, to start a career. Both of

them had preconceived a life of gaiety and beauty, of charming people

and pictures and concerts. But all those graces were behind a dusty wall

of shorthand and typewriting. Una's struggle in coming to New York had

just begun.

Gently arbitrary, dearer than ever to Una in her helpless longing for

kindly neighbors and the familiar places, Mrs. Golden went on hoping

that she could persuade Una to go back to Panama. She never seemed to

realize that their capital wasn't increasing as time passed. Sometimes

impatient at her obtuseness, sometimes passionate with comprehending

tenderness, Una devoted herself to her, and Mr. Schwirtz and Sanford

Hunt and Sam Weintraub and Todd faded. She treasured her mother's

happiness at their Christmas dinner with the Sessionses. She encouraged

the Sessionses to come up to the flat as often as they could, and she

lulled her mother to a tolerable calm boredom. Before it was convenient

to think of men again, her school-work was over.

The commercial college had a graduation once a month. On January 15,

1906, Una finished her course, regretfully said good-by to Sam

Weintraub, and to Sanford Hunt, who had graduated in mid-December, but

had come back for "class commencement"; and at the last moment she

hesitated so long over J. J. Todd's hints about calling some day, that

he was discouraged and turned away. Una glanced about the

study-hall--the first place where she had ever been taken seriously as a

worker--and marched off to her first battle in the war of business.

CHAPTER IV

Sanford Hunt telephoned to Una that he and Mr. Julius Edward

Schwirtz--whom he called "Eddie"--had done their best to find an

"opening" for her in the office of the Lowry Paint Company, but that

there was no chance.

The commercial college gave her the names of several possible employers,

but they all wanted approximate perfection at approximately nothing a

week. After ten days of panic-stricken waiting at the employment office

of a typewriter company, and answering want advertisements, the

typewriter people sent her to the office of the _Motor and Gas Gazette_,

a weekly magazine for the trade. In this atmosphere of the literature of

lubricating oil and drop forgings and body enamels, as an

eight-dollar-a-week copyist, Una first beheld the drama and romance of

the office world.

§ 2

There is plenty of romance in business. Fine, large, meaningless,

general terms like romance and business can always be related. They take

the place of thinking, and are highly useful to optimists and lecturers.

But in the world of business there is a bewildered new Muse of Romance,

who is clad not in silvery tissue of dreams, but in a neat blue suit

that won't grow too shiny under the sleeves.

Adventure now, with Una, in the world of business; of offices and jobs

and tired, ordinary people who know such reality of romance as your

masquerading earl, your shoddy Broadway actress, or your rosily amorous

dairy-maid could never imagine. The youths of poetry and of the modern

motor-car fiction make a long diversion of love; while the sleezy-coated

office-man who surprises a look of humanness in the weary eyes of the

office-woman, knows that he must compress all the wonder of madness into

five minutes, because the Chief is prowling about, glancing meaningly at

the little signs that declare, "Your time is your employer's money;

don't steal it."

A world is this whose noblest vista is composed of desks and

typewriters, filing-cases and insurance calendars, telephones, and the

bald heads of men who believe dreams to be idiotic. Here, no galleon

breasts the sky-line; no explorer in evening clothes makes love to an

heiress. Here ride no rollicking cowboys, nor heroes of the great

European war. It is a world whose crises you cannot comprehend unless

you have learned that the difference between a 2-A pencil and a 2-B

pencil is at least equal to the contrast between London and Tibet;

unless you understand why a normally self-controlled young woman may

have a week of tragic discomfort because she is using a billing-machine

instead of her ordinary correspondence typewriter. The shifting of the

water-cooler from the front office to the packing-room may be an epochal

event to a copyist who apparently has no human existence beyond bending

over a clacking typewriter, who seems to have no home, no family, no

loves; in whom all pride and wonder of life and all transforming drama

seem to be satisfied by the possession of a new V-necked blouse. The

moving of the water-cooler may mean that she must now pass the sentinel

office-manager; that therefore she no longer dares break the incredible

monotony by expeditions to get glasses of water. As a consequence she

gives up the office and marries unhappily.

A vast, competent, largely useless cosmos of offices. It spends much

energy in causing advertisements of beer and chewing-gum and union suits

and pot-cleansers to spread over the whole landscape. It marches out

ponderous battalions to sell a brass pin. It evokes shoes that are

uncomfortable, hideous, and perishable, and touchingly hopes that all

women will aid the cause of good business by wearing them. It turns

noble valleys into fields for pickles. It compels men whom it has never

seen to toil in distant factories and produce useless wares, which are

never actually brought into the office, but which it nevertheless sells

to the heathen in the Solomon Islands in exchange for commodities whose

very names it does not know; and in order to perform this miracle of

transmutation it keeps stenographers so busy that they change from dewy

girls into tight-lipped spinsters before they discover life.

The reason for it all, nobody who is actually engaged in it can tell

you, except the bosses, who believe that these sacred rites of composing

dull letters and solemnly filing them away are observed in order that

they may buy the large automobiles in which they do not have time to

take the air. Efficiency of production they have learned; efficiency of

life they still consider an effeminate hobby.

An unreasonable world, sacrificing bird-song and tranquil dusk and high

golden noons to selling junk--yet it rules us. And life lives there. The

office is filled with thrills of love and distrust and ambition. Each

alley between desks quivers with secret romance as ceaselessly as a

battle-trench, or a lane in Normandy.

§ 3

Una's first view of the _Motor and Gas Gazette_ was of an overwhelming

mass of desks and files and books, and a confusing, spying crowd of

strange people, among whom the only safe, familiar persons were Miss

Moynihan, the good-natured solid block of girl whom she had known at the

commercial college, and Mr. S. Herbert Ross, the advertising-manager,

who had hired her. Mr. Ross was a poet of business; a squat, nervous

little man, whose hair was cut in a Dutch bang, straight across his

forehead, and who always wore a black bow tie and semi-clerical black

clothes. He had eyed Una amusedly, asked her what was her reaction to

green and crimson posters, and given her a little book by himself, "R U

A Time-clock, Mr. Man?" which, in large and tremendously black type,

related two stories about the youth of Carnegie, and strongly advocated

industry, correspondence schools, and expensive advertising. When Una

entered the office, as a copyist, Mr. S. Herbert Ross turned her over to

the office-manager, and thereafter ignored her; but whenever she saw him

in pompous conference with editors and advertisers she felt proudly that

she knew him.

The commercial college had trained her to work with a number of people,

as she was now to do in the office; but in the seriousness and savage

continuity of its toil, the office was very different. There was no

let-up; she couldn't shirk for a day or two, as she had done at the

commercial college. It was not so much that she was afraid of losing her

job as that she came to see herself as part of a chain. The others,

beyond, were waiting for her; she mustn't hold them up. That was her

first impression of the office system, that and the insignificance of

herself in the presence of the office-hierarchy--manager above manager

and the Mysterious Owner beyond all. She was alone; once she

transgressed they would crush her. They had no personal interest in her,

none of them, except her classmate, Miss Moynihan, who smiled at her and

went out to lunch with her.

They two did not dare to sit over parcels of lunch with the curious

other girls. Before fifteen-cent lunches of baked apples, greasy

Napoleons, and cups of coffee, at a cheap restaurant, Miss Moynihan and

she talked about the office-manager, the editors, the strain of copying

all day, and they united in lyric hatred of the lieutenant of the girls,

a satiric young woman who was a wonderful hater. Una had regarded Miss

Moynihan as thick and stupid, but not when she had thought of falling in

love with Charlie Martindale at a dance at Panama, not in her most

fervid hours of comforting her mother, had she been so closely in

sympathy with any human being as she was with Miss Moynihan when they

went over and over the problems of office politics, office favorites,

office rules, office customs.

The customs were simple: Certain hours for arrival, for lunch, for

leaving; women's retiring-room embarrassedly discovered to be on

the right behind the big safe; water-cooler in the center of the

stenographers' room. But the office prejudices, the taboos, could

not be guessed. They offered you every possible chance of "queering

yourself." Miss Moynihan, on her very first day, discovered,

perspiringly, that you must never mention the _Gazette's_ rival,

the _Internal Combustion News_. The _Gazette's_ attitude was

that the _News_ did not exist--except when the _Gazette_

wanted the plate of an advertisement which the _News_ was to

forward. You mustn't chew gum in the office; you were to ask favors

of the lieutenant, not of the office-manager; and you mustn't be

friendly with Mr. Bush of the circulation department, nor with Miss

Caldwell, the filing-clerk. Why they were taboo Una never knew; it

was an office convention; they seemed pleasant and proper people

enough.

She was initiated into the science of office supplies. In the commercial

college the authorities had provided stenographers' note-books and

pencils, and the representatives of typewriter companies had given

lectures on cleaning and oiling typewriters, putting in new ribbons,

adjusting tension-wheels. But Una had not realized how many tools she

had to know----

Desks, filing-cabinets, mimeographs, adding-machines, card indexes, desk

calendars, telephone-extensions, adjustable desk-lights. Wire

correspondence-baskets, erasers, carbon paper, type-brushes, dust-rags,

waste-baskets. Pencils, hard and soft, black and blue and red. Pens,

pen-points, backing-sheets, note-books, paper-clips. Mucilage, paste,

stationery; the half-dozen sorts of envelopes and letter-heads.

Tools were these, as important in her trade as the masthead and black

flag, the cutlasses and crimson sashes, the gold doubloons and damsels

fair of pirate fiction; or the cheese and cream, old horses and

slumberous lanes of rustic comedy. As important, and perhaps to be

deemed as romantic some day; witness the rhapsodic advertisements of

filing-cabinets that are built like battle-ships; of carbon-paper that

is magic-inked and satin-smooth.

Not as priest or soldier or judge does youth seek honor to-day, but as a

man of offices. The business subaltern, charming and gallant as the

jungle-gallopers of Kipling, drills files, not of troops, but of

correspondence. The artist plays the keys, not of pianos, but of

typewriters. Desks, not decks; courts of office-buildings, not of

palaces--these are the stuff of our latter-day drama. Not through

wolf-haunted forests nor purple cañons, but through tiled hallways and

elevators move our heroes of to-day.

And our heroine is important not because she is an Amazon or a Ramona,

but because she is representative of some millions of women in business,

and because, in a vague but undiscouraged way, she keeps on inquiring

what women in business can do to make human their existence of loveless

routine.

§ 4

Una spent much of her time in copying over and over--a hundred times,

two hundred times--form-letters soliciting advertising, letters too

personal in appearance to be multigraphed. She had lists of

manufacturers of motor-car accessories, of makers of lubricating oils,

of distributors of ball-bearings and speedometers and springs and

carburetors and compositions for water-proofing automobile tops.

Sometimes she was requisitioned by the editorial department to copy in

form legible for the printer the rough items sent in by outsiders for

publication in the _Gazette_. Una, like most people of Panama, had

believed that there was something artistic about the office of any

publication. One would see editors--wonderful men like grand dukes,

prone to lunch with the President. But there was nothing artistic about

the editorial office of the _Gazette_--several young men in

shirt-sleeves and green celluloid eye-shades, very slangy and

pipe-smelly, and an older man with unpressed trousers and ragged

mustache. Nor was there anything literary in the things that Una copied

for the editorial department; just painfully handwritten accounts of the

meeting of the Southeastern Iowa Auto-dealers' Association; or boasts

about the increased sales of Roadeater Tires, a page originally smartly

typed, but cut and marked up by the editors.

Lists and letters and items, over and over; sitting at her typewriter

till her shoulder-blades ached and she had to shut her eyes to the blur

of the keys. The racket of office noises all day. The three-o'clock hour

when she felt that she simply could not endure the mill till five

o'clock. No interest in anything she wrote. Then the blessed hour of

release, the stretching of cramped legs, and the blind creeping to the

Subway, the crush in the train, and home to comfort the mother who had

been lonely all day.

Such was Una's routine in these early months of 1906. After the novelty

of the first week it was all rigidly the same, except that distinct

personalities began to emerge from the mass.

Especially the personality of Walter Babson.

§ 5

Out of the mist of strange faces, blurred hordes of people who swaggered

up the office aisle so knowingly, and grinned at her when she asked

questions, individualities began to take form:

Miss Moynihan; the Jewish stenographer with the laughing lips and hot

eyes; the four superior older girls in a corner, the still more superior

girl lieutenant, and the office-manager, who was the least superior of

all; the telephone-girl; the office-boys; Mr. S. Herbert Ross and his

assistant; the managing editor; a motor magnate whose connection was

mysterious; the owner, a courteous, silent, glancing man who was

reported to be hard and "stingy."

Other people still remained unidentifiable to her, but the office

appeared smaller and less formidable in a month. Out of each nine

square feet of floor space in the office a novel might have been made:

the tale of the managing editor's neurotic wife; the tragedy of Chubby

Hubbard, the stupid young editor who had been a college football star,

then an automobile racer, then a failure. And indeed there was a whole

novel, a story told and retold, in the girls' gossip about each of the

men before whom they were so demure. But it was Walter Babson whom the

girls most discussed and in whom Una found the most interest.

On her first day in the office she had been startled by an astounding

young man who had come flying past her desk, with his coat off, his

figured waistcoat half open, his red four-in-hand tie askew under a

rolling soft collar. He had dashed up to the office-manager and

demanded, "Say! Say! Nat! Got that Kokomobile description copied for me

yet? Heh? Gawd! you're slow. Got a cigarette?" He went off, puffing out

cigarette smoke, shaking his head and audibly muttering, "Slow bunch,

werry." He seemed to be of Una's own age, or perhaps a year older--a

slender young man with horn-rimmed eye-glasses, curly black hair, and a

trickle of black mustache. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbow, and

Una had a secret, shamed, shivering thrill in the contrast of the

dead-white skin of his thin forearms with the long, thick, soft, black

hairs matted over them. They seemed at once feminine and acidly male.

"Crazy idiot," she observed, apparently describing herself and the

nervous young man together. But she knew that she wanted to see him

again.

She discovered that he was prone to such violent appearances; that his

name was Walter Babson; that he was one of the three desk editors under

the managing editor; that the stenographers and office-boys alternately

disapproved of him, because he went on sprees and borrowed money from

anybody in sight, and adored him because he was democratically frank

with them. He was at once a hero, clown, prodigal son, and preacher of

honesty. It was variously said that he was a socialist, an anarchist,

and a believer in an American monarchy, which he was reported as

declaring would "give some color to this flat-faced province of a

country." It was related that he had been "fresh" even to the owner, and

had escaped discharge only by being the quickest worker in the office,

the best handy man at turning motor statistics into lively news-stories.

Una saw that he liked to stand about, bawling to the quizzical S.

Herbert Ross that "this is a hell of a shop to work in--rotten pay and

no _esprit de corps_. I'd quit and free-lance if I could break in with

fiction, but a rotten bunch of log-rollers have got the inside track

with all the magazines and book-publishers."

"Ever try to write any fiction?" Una once heard S. Herbert retort.

"No, but Lord! any fool could write better stuff than they publish. It's

all a freeze-out game; editors just accept stuff by their friends."

In one week Una heard Walter Babson make approximately the same

assertions to three different men, and to whoever in the open office

might care to listen and profit thereby. Then, apparently, he ceased to

hear the call of literature, and he snorted at S. Herbert Ross's stodgy

assistant that he was a wage-slave, and a fool not to form a clerks'

union. In a week or two he was literary again. He dashed down to the

office-manager, poked a sheet of copy-paper at him, and yelped: "Say,

Nat. Read that and tell me just what you think of it. I'm going to put

some literary flavor into the _Gas-bag_ even if it does explode it.

Look--see. I've taken a boost for the Kells Karburetor--rotten lying

boost it is, too--and turned it into this running verse, read it like

prose, pleasant and easy to digest, especially beneficial to children

and S. Herbert Souse, Sherbert Souse, I mean." He rapidly read an

amazing lyric beginning, "Motorists, you hadn't better monkey with the

carburetor, all the racers, all the swells, have equipped their cars

with Kells. We are privileged to announce what will give the trade a

jounce, that the floats have been improved like all motorists would have

loved."

He broke off and shouted, "Punk last line, but I'll fix it up. Say,

that'll get 'em all going, eh? Say, I bet the Kells people use it in

bill-board ads. all over the country, and maybe sign my name. Ads., why

say, it takes a literary guy to write ads., not a fat-headed

commercialist like S. Charlie Hoss."

Two days later Una heard Babson come out and lament that the managing

editor didn't like his masterpiece and was going to use the Kells

Karburetor Kompany's original write-up. "That's what you get when you

try to give the _Gas-bag_ some literary flavor--don't appreciate it!"

She would rather have despised him, except that he stopped by the

office-boys' bench to pull their hair and tell them to read English

dictionaries. And when Miss Moynihan looked dejected, Babson demanded of

her, "What's trouble, girlie? Anybody I can lick for you? Glad to fire

the owner, or anything. Haven't met you yet, but my name is Roosevelt,

and I'm the new janitor," with a hundred other chuckling idiocies, till

Miss Moynihan was happy again. Una warmed to his friendliness, like that

of a tail-wagging little yellow pup.

And always she craved the touch of his dark, blunt, nervous hands.

Whenever he lighted a cigarette she was startled by his masculine way

of putting out the match and jerking it away from him in one abrupt

motion.... She had never studied male mannerisms before. To Miss Golden

of Panama men had always been "the boys."

All this time Walter Babson had never spoken to her.

CHAPTER V

The office-manager came casually up to Una's desk and said, "You haven't

taken any dictation yet, have you?"

"No, but," with urgent eagerness, "I'd like--I'm quite fast in

stenography."

"Well, Mr. Babson, in the editorial department, wants to give some

dictation and you might try--"

Una was so excited that she called herself a silly little fool. She

seized her untouched note-book, her pencils sharpened like lances, and

tried to appear a very mouse of modesty as she marched down the office

to take her first real dictation, to begin her triumphant career.... And

to have Walter Babson, the beloved fool, speak to her.

It was a cold shock to have to stand waiting behind Babson while he

rummaged in his roll-top desk and apparently tried to pull out his hair.

He looked back at her and blurted, "Oh! You, Miss Golden? They said

you'd take some dictation. Chase those blue-prints off that chair and

sit down. Be ready in a sec."

While she sat on the edge of the chair Babson yanked out drawers,

plunged his wriggling hands into folders, thrashed through a pile of

papers and letters that over-flowed a wire basket, and even hauled a

dictionary down from the top of the desk and hopefully peered inside the

front cover. All the time he kept up comment at which Una smiled

doubtfully, not quite sure whether it was meant for her or not:

"Now what the doggone doggonishness did I ever do with those doggone

notes, anyway? I ask you, in the-- Here they-- Nope--"

At last he found inside a book on motor fuels the wad of copy-paper on

which he had scrawled notes with a broad, soft pencil, and he began to

dictate a short article on air-cooling. Una was terrified lest she be

unable to keep up, but she had read recent numbers of the _Gazette_

thoroughly, she had practised the symbols for motor technologies, and

she was not troubled by being watched. Indeed, Babson seemed to have

enough to do in keeping his restless spirit from performing the

dismaying feat of leaping straight out of his body. He leaned back in

his revolving desk-chair with a complaining squawk from the spring, he

closed his eyes, put his fingers together piously, then seized the

chair-arms and held them, while he cocked one eye open and squinted at a

large alarm-clock on the desk. He sighed profoundly, bent forward, gazed

at his ankle, and reached forward to scratch it. All this time he was

dictating, now rapidly, now gurgling and grunting while he paused to

find a word.

"Don't be so _nervous_!" Una wanted to scream at him, and she wanted to

add, "You didn't ask my permission!" when he absently fumbled in a

cigarette-box.

She didn't like Walter Babson, after all!

But he stopped after a rhapsody on the divine merits of an air-cooling

system, clawed his billowing black hair, and sighed, "Sounds improbable,

don't it? Must be true, though; it's going to appear in the _Gazette_,

and that's the motor-dealer's bible. If you don't believe it, read the

blurbs we publish about ourselves!" Then he solemnly winked at her and

went on dictating.

When he had finished he demanded, "Ever take any dictation in this

office before?"

"No, sir."

"Ever take any motor dictation at all?"

"No, sir."

"Then you'd better read that back to me. Your immejit boss--the

office-manager--is all right, but the secretary of the company is always

pussy-footing around, and if you're ever having any trouble with your

stuff when old plush-ears is in sight, keep on typing fast, no matter

what you put down. Now read me the dope."

It was approximately correct. He nodded, and, "Good work, little girl,"

he said. "You'll get along all right. You get my dictation better than

that agitated antelope Miss Harman does, right now. That's all."

§ 2

So far as anything connected with Walter Babson could be regular, Una

became his regular stenographer, besides keeping up her copying. He was

always rushing out, apologizing for troubling her, sitting on the edge

of her desk, dictating a short letter, and advising her to try his

latest brand of health food, which, this spring, was bran

biscuits--probably combined with highballs and too much coffee. The

other stenographers winked at him, and he teased them about their

coiffures and imaginary sweethearts.... For three days the women's

coat-room boiled with giggles over Babson's declaration that Miss

MacThrostle was engaged to a burglar, and was taking a correspondence

course in engraving in order to decorate her poor dear husband's tools

with birds and poetic mottoes.

Babson was less jocular with Una than with the bouncing girls who were

natives of Harlem. But he smiled at her, as though they were

understanding friends, and once he said, but quietly, rather

respectfully, "You have nice hair--soft." She lay awake to croon that

to herself, though she denied that she was in love with this eccentric

waster.

Always Babson kept up his ejaculations and fidgeting. He often accused

himself of shiftlessness and begged her to make sure that he dictated

certain matter before he escaped for the evening. "Come in and bother

the life out of me. Come in every half-hour," he would say. When she did

come in he would crow and chuckle, "Nope. I refuse to be tempted yet; I

am a busy man. But maybe I'll give you those verbal jewels of great

price on your next visitation, oh thou in the vocative--some Latin

scholar, eh? Keep it up, kid; good work. Maybe you'll keep me from being

fired."

Usually he gave her the dictation before he went. But not always. And

once he disappeared for four days--on a drunk, everybody said, in

excited office gossip.

During Babson's desertion the managing editor called Una in and

demanded, "Did Mr. Babson give you some copy about the Manning Wind

Shield? No? Will you take a look in his desk for his notes about it?"

While Una was fumbling for the notes she did not expect to find, she

went through all the agony of the little shawled foreign wife for the

husband who has been arrested.

"I've got to help you!" she said to _his_ desk, to his bag of Bull

Durham, to his alarm-clock--even to a rather shocking collection of

pictures of chorus-girls and diaphanously-clad dancers which was pasted

inside the double drawer on the right side of the desk. In her great

surge of emotion, she noticed these posturing hussies far less than she

did a little volume of Rosetti, or the overshoes whose worn toes

suddenly revealed to her that Walter Babson, the editor, was not

rich--was not, perhaps, so very much better paid than herself.

She did not find the notes. She had to go to the managing editor,

trembling, all her good little heart wild with pain. The editor's brows

made a V at her report, and he grunted, "Well--"

For two days, till Walter Babson returned, she never failed to look up

when the outer door of the office opened.

She found herself immensely interested in trying to discover, from her

low plane as copyist, just what sort of a position Walter Babson

occupied up among the select souls. Nor was it very difficult. The

editor's stenographer may not appreciate all the subtleties of his wit,

and the refinements of his manner may leave her cold, but she does hear

things, she hears the Big Chief's complaints.

Una discovered that the owner and the managing editor did not regard

Walter Babson as a permanent prop of the institution; that they would

keep him, at his present salary of twenty-five dollars a week, only till

some one happened in who would do the same work for less money. His

prose was clever but irregular; he wasn't always to be depended upon for

grammar; in everything he was unstable; yet the owner's secretary

reported the owner as saying that some day, if Babson married the right

woman, he would "settle down and make good."

Una did not dare to make private reservations regarding what "the right

woman" ought to mean in this case, but she burned at the thought of

Walter Babson's marrying, and for an instant she saw quite clearly the

film of soft dark hair that grew just below his sharp cheek-bone. But

she forgot the sweetness of the vision in scorn of herself for even

thinking of marriage with a weakling; scorn of herself for aspiring to

marry a man who regarded her as only a dull stenographer; and a maternal

anxiety over him that was untouched by passion.

Babson returned to the office, immaculate, a thin, fiery soul. But he

was closeted with the secretary of the company for an hour, and when he

came out his step was slow. He called for Una and dictated articles in a

quiet voice, with no jesting. His hand was unsteady, he smoked

cigarettes constantly, and his eye was an unwholesome yellow.

She said to him suddenly, a few days later, "Mr. Babson, I'd be glad if

I could take care of any papers or anything for you."

"Thanks. You might stick these chassis sketches away some place right

now."

So she was given the chance to keep his desk straight. He turned to her

for everything.

He said to her, abruptly, one dreary late afternoon of April when she

felt immensely languid and unambitious: "You're going to succeed--unless

you marry some dub. But there's one rule for success--mind you, I don't

follow it myself, I _can't_, but it's a grand old hunch: 'If you want to

get on, always be ready to occupy the job just ahead of you.' Only--what

the devil _is_ the job just ahead of a stenog.? I've been thinking of

you and wondering. What is it?"

"Honestly, Mr. Babson, I don't know. Here, anyway. Unless it's

lieutenant of the girls."

"Well--oh, that's just miffle-business, that kind of a job. Well, you'd

better learn to express yourself, anyway. Some time you women folks will

come into your own with both feet. Whenever you get the chance, take my

notes and try to write a better spiel from them than I do.... That won't

be hard, I guess!"

"I don't know why you are so modest, Mr. Babson. Every girl in the

office thinks you write better than any of the other editors."

"Yuh--but they don't know. They think that just because I chuck 'em

under the chin. I can't do this technical stuff.... Oh, _Lord_! what an

evening it'll be!... I suppose I'll go to a show. Nice, lonely city,

what?... You come from here?"

"From Pennsylvania."

"Got any folks?"

"My mother is here with me."

"That's nice. I'll take her and you to some bum two-bit vaudeville show

some night, if you'd like.... Got to show my gratitude to you for

standing my general slovenliness.... Lord! nice evening--dine at a

rôtisserie with a newspaper for companion. Well--g' night and g' luck."

Una surprised her mother, when they were vivisecting the weather after

dinner, by suddenly crying all over the sofa cushions.

She knew all of Walter Babson's life from those two or three sentences

of his.

§ 3

François Villons America has a-plenty. An astonishing number of

Americans with the literary itch do contrive to make a living out of

that affliction. They write motion-picture scenarios and fiction for the

magazines that still regard detective stories as the zenith of original

art. They gather in woman-scented flats to discuss sex, or in

hard-voiced groups to play poker. They seem to find in the creation of

literature very little besides a way of evading regular office hours.

Below this stratum of people so successful that one sometimes sees their

names in print is the yearning band of young men who want to write. Just

to write--not to write anything in particular; not to express any

definite thought, but to be literary, to be Bohemian, to dance with

slim young authoresses of easy morals, and be jolly dogs and free souls.

Some of them are dramatists with unacted dramas; some of them do free

verse which is just as free as the productions of regular licensed

poets. Some of them do short stories--striking, rather biological, very

destructive of conventions. Some of them are ever so handy at all forms;

they are perennial candidates for any job as book-reviewer, dramatic

critic, or manuscript-reader, since they have the naïve belief that

these occupations require neither toil nor training, and enable one to

"write on the side." Meanwhile they make their livings as sub-editors on

trade journals, as charity-workers, or as assistants to illiterate

literary agents.

To this slum of literature Walter Babson belonged. He felt that he was

an author, though none of his poetry had ever been accepted, and though

he had never got beyond the first chapter of any of his novels, nor the

first act of any of his plays (which concerned authors who roughly

resembled Walter Babson).

He was distinguished from his fellows by the fact that each year he grew

more aware that he hadn't even a dim candle of talent; that he was

ill-planned and unpurposed; that he would have to settle down to the

ordinary gray limbo of jobs and offices--as soon as he could get control

of his chaotic desires. Literally, he hated himself at times; hated his

own egotism, his treacherous appetite for drink and women and sloth, his

imitative attempts at literature. But no one knew how bitterly he

despised himself, in lonely walks in the rain, in savage pacing about

his furnished room. To others he seemed vigorously conceited, cock-sure,

noisily ready to blame the world for his own failures.

Walter Babson was born in Kansas. His father was a farmer and

horse-doctor, a heavy drinker, an eccentric who joined every radical

political movement. In a country school, just such a one as Una had

taught, then in high school in a near-by town, Walter had won all the

prizes for essays and debating, and had learned a good deal about

Shakespeare and Cæsar and George Washington. Also he had learned a good

deal about drinking beer, smoking manfully, and tempting the giggling

girls who hung about the "deepot." He ran away from high school, and in

the most glorious years of his life worked his way down the Mississippi

and up the Rio Grande, up to Alaska and down to Costa Rica, a butt and

jester for hoboes, sailors, longshoremen, miners, cow-punchers,

lunch-room owners, and proprietors of small newspapers. He learned to

stick type and run a press. He returned to Kansas and worked on a

country newspaper, studying poetry and college-entrance requirements in

the evening. He had, at this time, the not entirely novel idea that "he

ought to be able to make a lot of good fiction out of all his

experiences." Actually, he had no experiences, because he had no

instinct for beauty. The proof is that he read quite solemnly and

reverently a vile little periodical for would-be authors, which reduced

authorship to a way of earning one's living by supplying editors with

cheap but ingenious items to fill space. It put literature on a level

with keeping a five-and-ten-cent store. But Walter conned its pompous

trade journal discussions as to whether the name and address of the

author should be typed on the left or the right side of the first page

of a manuscript; its lively little symposia, by such successful

market-gardeners of literature as Mamie Stuyvesant Blupp and Bill Brown

and Dr. J. F. Fitzneff, on the inspiring subject of whether it paid

better to do filler verse for cheap magazines, or long verse for the big

magazines. At the end, this almost madly idealistic journal gave a list

of wants of editors; the editor of _Lingerie and Laughter_ wanted

"short, snappy stuff with a kick in it; especially good yarns about

models, grisettes, etc." _Wanderlust_ was in the market for "stories

with a punch that appealed to every red-blooded American; nothing about

psychology, problems, Europe, or love wanted." _The Plymouth Rock

Fancier_ announced that it could use "a good, lively rural poem every

week; must be clean and original."

Pathos there was in all of this; the infinitely little men and women

daring to buy and sell "short, snappy stuff" in this somber and terribly

beautiful world of Balzac and Wells and Turgenieff. And pathos there was

in that wasted year when Walter Babson sought to climb from the

gossiping little prairie town to the grandeur of great capitals by

learning to be an efficient manufacturer of "good, lively rural poems."

He neglected even his college-entrance books, the Ruskin whose clots of

gilt might have trained him to look for real gold, and the stilted Burke

who might have given him a vision of empires and races and social

destinies. And for his pathetic treachery he wasn't even rewarded. His

club-footed verses were always returned with printed rejection slips.

When at last he barely slid into Jonathan Edwards College, Iowa, Walter

was already becoming discouraged; already getting the habit of blaming

the gods, capitalists, editors, his father, the owner of the country

newspaper on which he had been working, for everything that went wrong.

He yammered destructive theories which would have been as obnoxious to a

genuine fighting revolutionist as they were sacrilegious to his

hard-fisted, earnest, rustic classmates in Jonathan Edwards. For Walter

was not protesting against social injustice. The slavery of

rubber-gatherers in the Putumayo and of sweatshop-workers in New York

did not exist for him. He was protesting because, at the age of twenty,

his name was not appearing in large flattering capitals on the covers of

magazines.

Yet he was rather amusing; he helped plodding classmates with their

assignments, and he was an active participant in all worthy movements to

raise hell--as they admirably described it. By the end of his Freshman

year he had given up all attempts to be a poet and to extract

nourishment from the college classes, which were as hard and unpalatable

as dried codfish. He got drunk, he vented his energy in noisy meetings

with itinerant _filles de joie_, who were as provincial and rustic, as

bewildered and unfortunate as the wild country boys, who in them found

their only outlet for youth's madness. Walter was abruptly expelled from

college by the one man in the college whom he respected--the saintly

president, who had dreams of a new Harvard on the prairies.

So Walter Babson found himself at twenty-one an outcast. He

declaimed--though no one would believe him--that all the gentle souls he

had ever encountered were weak; all the virile souls vicious or

suspicious.

He drifted. He doubted himself, and all the more noisily asserted his

talent and the injustice of the world. He looked clean and energetic and

desirous, but he had nothing on which to focus. He became an active but

careless reporter on newspapers in Wichita, Des Moines, Kansas City, St.

Louis, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco. Between times he sold

real-estate and insurance and sets of travel books, for he had no pride

of journalism; he wanted to keep going and keep interested and make

money and spend it; he wanted to express himself without trying to find

out what his self was.

It must be understood that, for all his vices, Walter was essentially

clean and kindly. He rushed into everything, the bad with the good. He

was not rotten with heavy hopelessness; though he was an outcast from

his home, he was never a pariah. Not Walter, but the smug, devilish

cities which took their revenues from saloon-keeping were to blame when

he turned from the intolerable dullness of their streets to the

excitement of alcohol in the saloons and brothels which they made so

much more amusing than their churches and parlors.

Everywhere in the Western newspaper circles Walter heard stories of

Californians who had gone East and become geniuses the minute they

crossed the Hudson.... Walter also went East and crossed the Hudson, but

he did not become a genius. If there had been an attic to starve in, he

would have starved in one, but as New York has nothing so picturesque,

he starved in furnished rooms instead, while he wrote "special stories"

for Sunday newspapers, and collected jokes for a syndicated humorous

column. He was glad to become managing editor (though he himself was the

only editor he had to manage) of a magazine for stamp-collectors. He

wrote some advertisements for a Broadway dealer in automobile

accessories, read half a dozen books on motors, and brazenly demanded

his present position on the _Motor and Gas Gazette_.

He was as far from the rarified air of Bohemia (he really believed that

sort of thing) as he had been in Kansas, except that he knew one man who

made five thousand dollars a year by writing stories about lumberjacks,

miners, cow-punchers, and young ladies of quite astounding courage. He

was twenty-seven years old when he met Una Golden. He still read Omar

Khayyam. He had a vague plan of going into real estate. There ought, he

felt, to be money in writing real-estate advertisements.

He kept falling in love with stenographers and waitresses, with

actresses whom he never met. He was never satisfied. He didn't at all

know what he wanted, but he wanted something stronger than himself.

He was desperately lonely--a humorous figure who had dared to aspire

beyond the manure-piles of his father's farm; therefore a young man to

be ridiculed. And in his tragic loneliness he waited for the day when he

should find any love, any labor, that should want him enough to seek him

and demand that he sacrifice himself.

§ 4

It was Una's first city spring.

Save in the squares, where the bourgeoning trees made green-lighted

spaces for noon-time lovers, there was no change; no blossomy stir in

asphalt and cement and brick and steel. Yet everything was changed.

Between the cornices twenty stories above the pavement you could see a

slit of softer sky, and there was a peculiar radiance in just the light

itself, whether it lay along the park turf or made its way down an

air-well to rest on a stolid wall of yellow brick. The river breeze,

flowing so persuasively through streets which had been stormed by dusty

gales, bore happiness. Grind-organs made music for ragged, dancing

children, and old brick buildings smelled warm. Peanut-wagons came out

with a long, shrill whine, locusts of the spring.

In the office even the most hustling of the great ones became human.

They talked of suburban gardens and of motoring out to country clubs for

tennis. They smiled more readily, and shamelessly said, "I certainly got

the spring fever for fair to-day"; and twice did S. Herbert Ross go off

to play golf all afternoon. The stenographer who commuted--always there

is one girl in the office who commutes--brought spring in the form of

pussy-willows and apple-blossoms, and was noisily envied.

The windows were open now, and usually some one was speculatively

looking down to the life on the pavement, eight stories below. At

noon-hour the younger girls of the office strolled along the sidewalk in

threes and fours, bareheaded, their arms about one another, their

spring-time lane an irregular course between boxes in front of

loft-buildings; or they ate their box-and-paper-napkin lunches on the

fire-escape that wound down into the court. They gigglingly drew their

skirts about their ankles and flirted with young porters and packers who

leaned from windows across the court. Una sat with them and wished that

she could flirt like the daughters of New York. She listened eagerly to

their talk of gathering violets in Van Cortlandt Park and tramping on

the Palisades. She noted an increased number of excited confidences to

the effect that, "He says to me--" and "I says to him--" and, "Say, gee!

honest, Tess, he's a swell fellow." She caught herself wanting to tramp

the Palisades with--with the Walter Babson who didn't even know her

first name.

When she left the flat these mornings she forgot her lonely mother

instantly in the treacherous magic of the tender sky, and wanted to run

away, to steal the blue and silver day for her own. But it was gone when

she reached the office--no silver and blue day was here; but, on

golden-oak desk and oak-and-frosted-glass semi-partitions, the same

light as in the winter. Sometimes, if she got out early, a stilly

afterglow of amber and turquoise brought back the spring. But all day

long she merely saw signs that otherwhere, for other people, spring did

exist; and she wistfully trusted in it as she watched and helped Walter

Babson.

She was conscious that she was working more intimately with him as a

comrade now, not as clerk with executive. There had been no one

illuminating moment of understanding; he was impersonal with her; but

each day their relationship was less of a mechanical routine, more of a

personal friendship. She felt that he really depended on her steady

carefulness; she knew that through the wild tangle of his impulsiveness

she saw a desire to be noble.

§ 5

He came clattering down the aisle of desks to her one May afternoon, and

begged, "Say, Miss Golden, I'm stuck. I got to get out some publicity on

the Governor's good-roads article we're going to publish; want to send

it out to forty papers in advance, and I can't get only a dozen proofs.

And it's got to go off to-night. Can you make me some copies? You can

use onion-skin paper and carbon 'em and make anyway five copies at a

whack. But prob'ly you'd have to stay late. Got anything on to-night?

Could you do it? Could you do it? Could you?"

"Surely."

"Well, here's the stuff. Just single-space that introductory spiel at

the top, will you?"

Una rudely turned out of her typewriter a form-letter which she was

writing for S. Herbert Ross, and began to type Walter's publicity, her

shoulders bent, her eyes intent, oblivious to the steady stream of

gossip which flowed from stenographer to stenographer, no matter how

busy they were. He needed her! She would have stayed till midnight.

While the keys burred under her fingers she was unconsciously telling

herself a story of how she would be working half the night, with the

office still and shadowy, of how a dead-white face would peer through

the window near her desk (difficult of accomplishment, as the window was

eight stories up in air), of how she was to be pursued by a man on the

way home; and how, when she got there, her mother would say, "I just

don't see how you could neglect me like this all evening." All the while

she felt herself in touch with large affairs--an article by the Governor

of the State; these very sheets that she was typing to go to famous

newspapers, to the "thundering presses" of which she had read in

fiction; urgency, affairs, and--doing something for Walter Babson.

She was still typing swiftly at five-thirty, the closing hour. The

article was long; she had at least two hours of work ahead. Miss

Moynihan came stockily to say good-night. The other stenographers

fluttered out to the elevators. Their corner became oppressively quiet.

The office-manager gently puttered about, bade her good-night, drifted

away. S. Herbert Ross boomed out of his office, explaining the theory of

advertising to a gasoleny man in a pin-checked suit as they waddled to

the elevator. The telephone-girl hurried back to connect up a last call,

frowned while she waited, yanked out the plug, and scuttled away--a

creamy, roe-eyed girl, pretty and unhappy at her harassing job of

connecting nervous talkers all day. Four men, editors and

advertising-men, shouldered out, bawling over a rather feeble joke about

Bill's desire for a drink and their willingness to help him slay the

booze-evil. Una was conscious that they had gone, that walls of silence

were closing about her clacking typewriter. And that Walter Babson had

not gone; that he was sharing with her this whispering forsaken office.

Presently he came rambling out of the editorial-room.

He had taken off his grotesque, great horn-rimmed glasses. His eyes were

mutinous in his dark melancholy face; he drew a hand over them and shook

his head. Una was aware of all this in one glance. "Poor, tired boy!"

she thought.

He sat on the top of the nearest desk, hugged his knee, rocked back and

forth, and said, "Much left, Miss Golden?"

"I think I'll be through in about two hours."

"Oh, Lord! I can't let you stay that late."

"It doesn't matter. Really! I'll be glad. I haven't had to stay late

much."

For quite the first time he stared straight at her, saw her as a human

being. She was desperately hoping that her hair was smooth and that

there wasn't any blue from the typewriter ribbon daubed on her

cheeks!... He ceased his rocking; appraised her. A part of her brain was

wondering what he would do; a part longing to smile temptingly at him; a

part coldly commanding, "You will not be a little fool--he isn't

interested in you, and you won't try to make him be, either!"

"Why, you look as fagged as I feel," he said. "I suppose I'm as bad as

the rest. I kick like a steer when the Old Man shoves some extra work on

me, and then I pass the buck and make _you_ stay late. Say! Tell you

what we'll do." Very sweet to her was his "we," and his intimacy of

tone. "I'll start copying, too. I'm quite considerable at

machine-pounding myself, and we can get the thing done and mailed by

six-thirty or so, and then I'll buy you a handsome dinner at Childs's.

Gosh! I'll even blow you to a piece of pie; and I'll shoot you up home

by quarter to eight. Great stuff! Gimme a copy of the drool. Meanwhile

you'll have a whole hour for worried maiden thoughts over going out to

eat with the bad, crazy Wally Babson!"

His smile was a caress. Her breath caught, she smiled back at him

fearfully. Then he was gone. In the editorial office was heard the

banging of his heavy old typewriter--it was an office joke, Walter's

hammering of the "threshing-machine."

She began to type again, with mechanical rapidity, not consciously

seeing the copy, so distraught was she as she murmured, "Oh, I oughtn't

to go out with him.... But I will!... What nonsense! Why shouldn't I

have dinner with him.... Oh, I mustn't--I'm a typist and he's a boss....

But I will!"

Glancing down the quiet stretches of the office, to the windows looking

to westward, she saw that the sky was a delicate primrose. In a

loft-building rearing out of the low structures between her and the

North River, lights were springing out, and she--who ought to have known

that they marked weary, late-staying people like herself, fancied that

they were the lights of restaurants for gay lovers. She dismissed her

problem, forgot the mother who was waiting with a demand for all of

Una's youth, and settled down to a happy excitement in the prospect of

going out with Walter; of knowing him, of feeling again that smile.

He came prancing out with his copies of the article before she had

finished. "Some copyist, eh?" he cried. "Say, hustle and finish. Gee!

I've been smoking cigarettes to-day till my mouth tastes like a

fish-market. Want to eat and forget my troubles."

With her excitement dulled to a matter-of-fact hungriness, she trotted

beside him to a restaurant, one of the string of Vance eating-places, a

food-mill which tried to achieve originality by the use of imitation

rafters, a plate-rack aligned with landscape plates, and varnished black

tables for four instead of the long, marble tables which crowded the

patrons together in most places of the sort. Walter verbosely called her

attention to the mottoes painted on the wood, the individual table

lights in pink shades. "Just forget the eats, Miss Golden, and you can

imagine you're in a regular restaurant. Gosh! this place ought to

reconcile you to dining with the crazy Babson. I can't imagine a liaison

in a place where coffee costs five cents."

He sounded boisterous, but he took her coat so languidly, he slid so

loosely into his chair, that she burned with desire to soothe away his

office weariness. She forgot all reserve. She burst out: "Why do you

call yourself 'crazy'? Just because you have more energy than anybody

else in the office?"

"No," he said, grimly, snatching at the menu, "because I haven't any

purpose in the scheme of things."

Una told herself that she was pleased to see how the scrawny waitress

purred at Walter when he gave his order. Actually she was feeling

resentfully that no saw-voiced, galumphing Amazon of a waitress could

appreciate Walter's smile.

In a Vance eating-place, ordering a dinner, and getting approximately

what you order, is not a delicate epicurean art, but a matter of

business, and not till an enormous platter of "Vance's Special Ham and

Eggs, Country Style," was slammed down between them, and catsup,

Worcestershire sauce, napkins, more rolls, water, and another fork

severally demanded of the darting waitress, did Walter seem to remember

that this was a romantic dinner with a strange girl, not a deal in

food-supplies.

His wavering black eyes searched her face. She was agitatedly aware that

her skin was broken out in a small red spot beside her lips; but she

hoped that he would find her forehead clear, her mouth a flower. He

suddenly nodded, as though he had grown used to her and found her

comfortable. While his wreathing hands picked fantastically at a roll

and made crosses with lumps of sugar, his questions probed at that

hidden soul which she herself had never found. It was the first time

that any one had demanded her formula of life, and in her struggle to

express herself she rose into a frankness which Panama circles of

courtship did not regard as proper to young women.

"What's your ambition?" he blurted. "Going to just plug along and not

get anywhere?"

"No, I'm not; but it's hard. Women aren't trusted in business, and you

can't count without responsibility. All I can do is keep looking."

"Go out for suffrage, feminism, so on?"

"I don't know anything about them. Most women don't know anything about

them--about anything!"

"Huh! Most _people_ don't! Wouldn't have office-grinding if people did

know anything.... How much training have you had?"

"Oh, public school, high school, commercial college."

"Where?"

"Panama, Pennsylvania."

"I know. About like my own school in Kansas--the high-school principal

would have been an undertaker if he'd had more capital.... Gee!

principal and capital--might make a real cunning pun out of that if I

worked over it a little. I know.... Go to church?"

"Why--why, yes, of course."

"Which god do you favor at present--Unitarian or Catholic or Christian

Science or Seventh-Day Advent?"

"Why, it's the same--"

"Now don't spring that 'it's the same God' stuff on me. It isn't the

same God that simply hones for candles and music in an Episcopal Church

and gives the Plymouth Brotherhood a private copyright revelation that

organs and candles are wicked."

"You're terribly sacrilegious."

"You don't believe any such thing. Or else you'd lam me--same as they

used to do in the crusades. You don't really care a hang."

"No, I really don't care!" she was amazed to hear herself admit.

"Of course, I'm terribly crude and vulgar, but then what else can you be

in dealing with a bunch of churches that haven't half the size or beauty

of farmers' red barns? And yet the dubs go on asserting that they

believe the church is God's house. If I were God, I'd sure object to

being worse housed than the cattle. But, gosh! let's pass that up. If I

started in on what I think of almost anything--churches or schools, or

this lying advertising game--I'd yelp all night, and you could always

answer me that I'm merely a neurotic failure, while the big guns that I

jump on own motor-cars." He stopped his rapid tirade, chucked a lump of

sugar at an interrogative cat which was making the round of the tables,

scowled, and suddenly fired at her:

"What do you think of me?"

"You're the kindest person I ever met."

"Huh? Kind? Good to my mother?"

"Perhaps. You've made the office happy for me. I really admire you.... I

s'pose I'm terribly unladylike to tell you."

"Gee whiz!" he marveled. "Got an admirer! And I always thought you were

an uncommonly level-headed girl. Shows how you can fool 'em."

He smiled at her, directly, rather forlornly, proud of her praise.

Regardless of other tables, he thrust his arm across, and with the side

of his hand touched the side of hers for a second. Dejectedly he said:

"But why do you like me? I've good intentions; I'm willing to pinch

Tolstoi's laurels right off his grave, and orate like William Jennings

Bryan. And there's a million yearners like me. There ain't a

hall-bedroom boy in New York that wouldn't like to be a genius."

"I like you because you have fire. Mr. Babson, do you--"

"Walter!"

"How premature you are!"

"Walter!"

"You'll be calling me 'Una' next, and think how shocked the girls will

be."

"Oh no. I've quite decided to call you 'Goldie.' Sounds nice and

sentimental. But for heaven's sake go on telling me why you like me.

That isn't a hackneyed subject."

"Oh, I've never known anybody with _fire_, except maybe S. Herbert Ross,

and he--he--"

"He blobs around."

"Yes, something like that. I don't know whether you are ever going to do

anything with your fire, but you do have it, Mr. Babson!"

"I'll probably get fired with it.... Say, do you read Omar?"

In nothing do the inarticulate "million hall-room boys who want to be

geniuses," the ordinary, unshaved, not over-bathed, ungrammatical young

men of any American city, so nearly transcend provincialism as in an

enthusiasm over their favorite minor cynic, Elbert Hubbard or John

Kendrick Bangs, or, in Walter Babson's case, Mr. Fitzgerald's variations

on Omar. Una had read Omar as a pretty poem about roses and murmurous

courts, but read him she had; and such was Walter's delight in that fact

that he immediately endowed her with his own ability to enjoy cynicism.

He jabbed at the menu with a fork and glowed and shouted, "Say, isn't it

great, that quatrain about 'Take the cash and let the credit go'?"

While Una beamed and enjoyed her boy's youthful enthusiasm. Mother of

the race, ancient tribal woman, medieval chatelaine, she was just now;

kin to all the women who, in any age, have clapped their hands to their

men's boasting.

She agreed with him that "All these guys that pride themselves on being

gentlemen--like in English novels--are jus' the same as the dubs you see

in ordinary life."

And that it was not too severe an indictment to refer to the

advertising-manager as "S. Herbert Louse."

And that "the woman feeding by herself over at that corner table looks

mysterious, somehow. Gee! there must be a tragedy in her life."

But her gratification in being admitted to his enthusiasms was only a

background for her flare when he boldly caught up her white paw and

muttered, "Tired little hand that has to work so hard!"

She couldn't move; she was afraid to look at him. Clattering restaurant

and smell of roast pork and people about her all dissolved in her

agitation. She shook her head violently to awaken herself, heard herself

say, calmly, "It's terribly late. Don't you think it is?" and knew that

she was arising. But she moved beside him down the street in languor,

wondering in every cell of her etherealized body whether he would touch

her hand again; what he would do. Not till they neared the Subway

station did she, woman, the protector, noting his slow step and dragging

voice, rouse herself to say, "Oh, don't come up in the Subway; I'm used

to it, really!"

"My dear Goldie, you aren't used to anything in real life. Gee! I said

that snappily, and it don't mean a thing!" he gleefully pointed out. He

seized her arm, which prickled to the touch of his fingers, rushed her

down the Subway steps, and while he bought their tickets they smiled at

each other.

Several times on the way up he told her that it was a pleasure to have

some one who could "appreciate his honest-t'-God opinions of the

managing editor and S. Herbert Frost."

The Subway, plunging through unvaried darkness, levitated them from the

district of dark loft-buildings and theater-bound taxicabs to a far-out

Broadway, softened with trees and brightened with small apartment-houses

and little shops. They could see a great feathery space of vernal

darkness down over the Hudson at the end of a street. Steel-bound nature

seemed reaching for them wherever in a vacant lot she could get free and

send out quickening odors of fresh garden soil.

"Almost country," said Walter.

An urgent, daring look came into his eyes, under the light-cluster. He

stopped, took her arm. There was an edge of spring madness in his voice

as he demanded, "Wouldn't you like to run away with me to-night? Feel

this breeze on your lips--it's simply plumb-full of mystery. Wouldn't

you like to run away? and we'd tramp the Palisades till dawn and go to

sleep with the May sun glaring down the Hudson. Wouldn't you like to,

wouldn't you?"

She was conscious that, though his head was passionately thrown back,

his faunlike eyes stared into hers, and that his thin lips arched.

Terribly she wanted to say, "Yes!" Actually, Una Golden of Panama and

the _Gazette_ office speculated, for a tenth of a second, whether she

couldn't go. Madness--river-flow and darkness and the stars! But she

said, "No, I'm afraid we couldn't possibly!"

"No," he said, slowly. "Of course--of course I didn't mean we _could_;

but--Goldie, little Goldie that wants to live and rule things, wouldn't

you _like_ to go? _Wouldn't_ you?"

"Yes!... You hurt my arm so!... Oh, don't! We must--"

Her low cry was an appeal to him to save them from spring's scornful,

lusty demand; every throbbing nerve in her seemed to appeal to him; and

it was not relief, but gratitude, that she felt when he said, tenderly,

"Poor kid!... Which way? Come." They walked soberly toward the Golden

flat, and soberly he mused, "Poor kids, both of us trying to be good

slaves in an office when we want to smash things.... You'll be a

queen--you'll grab the throne same as you grab papers offn my desk. And

maybe you'll let me be court jester."

"Why do you say I'll--oh, be a queen? Do you mean literally, in

business, an executive?"

"Hadn't thought just what it did imply, but I suppose it's that."

"But why, _why_? I'm simply one of a million stenographers."

"Oh, well, you aren't satisfied to take things just as they're handed to

you. Most people are, and they stick in a rut and wonder who put them

there. All this success business is a mystery--listen to how successful

men trip themselves up and fall all over their foolish faces when they

try to explain to a bunch of nice, clean, young clerks how they stole

their success. But I know you'll get it, because you aren't satisfied

easily--you take my work and do it. And yet you're willing to work in

one corner till it's time to jump. That's my failing--I ain't willing to

stick."

"I--perhaps---- Here's the flat."

"Lord!" he cried; "we _got_ to walk a block farther and back."

"Well--"

They were stealing onward toward the breeze from the river before she

had finished her "Well."

"Think of wasting this hypnotizing evening talking of success--word that

means a big house in Yonkers! When we've become friends, Goldie, little

Goldie. Business of souls grabbing for each other! Friends--at least

to-night! Haven't we, dear? haven't we?"

"Oh, I hope so!" she whispered.

He drew her hand into his pocket and clasped it there. She looked shyly

down. Strange that her hand should not be visible when she could feel

its palm flame against his. She let it snuggle there, secure.... Mr.

Walter Babson was not a young man with "bad prospects," or "good

prospects"; he was love incarnate in magic warm flesh, and his hand was

the hand of love. She was conscious of his hard-starched cuff pressing

against her bare arm--a man's cuff under the rough surface of his man's

coat-sleeve.

He brought her back to the vestibule of the flat. For a moment he held

both her arms at the elbow and looked at her, while with a panic fear

she wondered why she could not move--wondered if he were going to kiss

her.

He withdrew his hands, sighed, "Good-night, Goldie. I won't be lonely

to-night!" and turned abruptly away.

Through all of Mrs. Golden's long, sobbing queries as to why Una had

left her alone all evening Una was patient. For she knew that she had

ahead of her a quiet moment when she would stand alone with the god of

love and pray to him to keep her boy, her mad boy, Walter.

While she heard her voice crisply explaining, "Why, you see, mother

dear, I simply had to get some work done for the office--" Una was

telling herself, "Some day he _will_ kiss me, and I'm _not_ sorry he

didn't to-night--not now any more I'm not.... It's so strange--I like to

have him touch me, and I simply never could stand other men touching

me!... I wonder if he's excited now, too? I wonder what he's doing....

Oh, I'm glad, glad I loved his hands!"

CHAPTER VI

"I never thought a nice girl could be in love with a man who is bad, and

I s'pose Walter is bad. Kind of. But maybe he'll become good."

So Una simple-heartedly reflected on her way to the Subway next morning.

She could not picture what he would do, now that it was hard, dry day

again, and all the world panted through dusty streets. And she

recklessly didn't care. For Walter was not hard and dry and dusty; and

she was going to see him again! Sometimes she was timorous about seeing

him, because he had read the longing in her face, had known her soul

with its garments thrown away. But, timorous or not, she had to see him;

she would never let him go, now that he had made her care for him.

Walter was not in sight when she entered the offices, and she was

instantly swept into the routine. Not clasping hands beguiled her, but

lists to copy, typing errors to erase, and the irritating adjustment of

a shift-key which fiendishly kept falling. For two hours she did not see

him.

About ten-thirty she was aware that he was prosaically strolling toward

her.

Hundreds of times, in secret maiden speculations about love, the girl

Una had surmised that it would be embarrassing to meet a man the morning

after you had yielded to his caress. It had been perplexing--one of

those mysteries of love over which virgins brood between chapters of

novels, of which they diffidently whisper to other girls when young

married friends are amazingly going to have a baby. But she found it

natural to smile up at Walter.... In this varnished, daytime office

neither of them admitted their madness of meeting hands.

He merely stooped over her desk and said, sketchily, "Mornin', little

Goldie."

Then for hours he seemed to avoid her. She was afraid. Most of all,

afraid of her own desire to go to him and wail that he was avoiding her.

At three o'clock, when the office tribe accept with naïve gratitude any

excuse to talk, to stop and tell one another a new joke, to rush to the

window and critically view a parade, Una saw that Walter was beginning

to hover near her. She was angry that he did not come straight to her.

He did not seem quite to know whether he wanted her or not. But her face

was calm above her typing while she watched him peer at her over the

shoulder of S. Herbert Ross, to whom he was talking. He drew nearer to

her. He examined a poster. She was oblivious of him. She was conscious

that he was trying to find an excuse to say something without openly

admitting to the ever-spying row of stenographers that he was interested

in her. He wambled up to her at last and asked for a letter she had

filed for him. She knew from the casual-looking drop of his eyes that he

was peering at the triangle of her clear-skinned throat, and for his

peeping uneasiness she rather despised him. She could fancy herself

shouting at him, "Oh, stop fidgeting! Make up your mind whether you like

me or not, and hurry up about it. I don't care now."

In which secret defiance she was able to luxuriate--since he was still

in the office, not gone from her forever!--till five o'clock, when the

detached young men of offices are wont to face another evening of

lonely irrelevancy, and desperately begin to reach for companionship.

At that hour Walter rushed up and begged, "Goldie, you _must_ come out

with me this evening."

"I'm sorry, but it's so late--"

"Oh, I know. Gee! if you knew how I've been thinking about you all day!

I've been wondering if I ought to-- I'm no good; blooming waster, I told

myself; and I wondered if I had any right to try to make you care;

but-- Oh, you _must_ come, Goldie!"

Una's pride steeled her. A woman can forgive any vice of man more

readily than she can forgive his not loving her so unhesitatingly that

he will demand her without stopping to think of his vices. Refusal to

sacrifice the beloved is not a virtue in youth.

Una said, clearly, "I am sorry, but I can't possibly this evening."

"Well--wish you could," he sighed.

As he moved away Una reveled in having refused his half-hearted

invitation, but already she was aware that she would regret it. She was

shaken with woman's fiercely possessive clinging to love.

The light on one side of her desk was shut off by the bulky presence of

Miss Moynihan. She whispered, huskily, "Say, Miss Golden, you want to

watch out for that Babson fellow. He acts like he was stuck on you. Say,

listen; everybody says he's a bad one. Say, listen, honest; they say

he'd compromise a lady jus' soon as not."

"Why, I don't know what you mean."

"Oh no, like fun you don't--him rubbering at you all day and

pussy-footing around!"

"Why, you're perfectly crazy! He was merely asking me about some

papers--"

"Oh yes, sure! Lemme tell you, a lady can't be none too careful about

her reputation with one of them skinny, dark devils like a Dago snooping

around."

"Why, you're absolutely ridiculous! Besides, how do you know Mr. Babson

is bad? Has he ever hurt anybody in the office?"

"No, but they say--"

"'They say'!"

"Now don't you go and get peeved after you and me been such good

friends, Miss Golden. I don't know that this Babson fellow ever done

anything worse than eat cracker-jack at South Beach, but I was just

telling you what they all say--how he drinks and goes with a lot of

totties and all; but--but he's all right if you say so, and--honest t'

Gawd, Miss Golden, listen, honest, I wouldn't knock him for nothing if I

thought he was your fellow! And," in admiration, "and him an editor!

Gee!"

Una tried to see herself as a princess forgiving her honest servitor.

But, as a matter of fact, she was plain angry that her romance should be

dragged into the nastiness of office gossip. She resented being a

stenographer, one who couldn't withdraw into a place for dreams. And she

fierily defended Walter in her mind; throbbed with a big, sweet pity for

her nervous, aspiring boy whose quest for splendor made him seem wild to

the fools about them.

When, just at five-thirty, Walter charged up to her again, she met him

with a smile of unrestrained intimacy.

"If you're going to be home at _all_ this evening, let me come up just

for fifteen minutes!" he demanded.

"Yes!" she said, breathlessly. "Oh, I oughtn't to, but--come up at

nine."

§ 2

Una had always mechanically liked children; had ejaculated, "Oh, the

pink little darling!" over each neighborhood infant; had pictured

children of her own; but never till that night had the desire to feel

her own baby's head against her breast been a passion. After dinner she

sat on the stoop of her apartment-house, watching the children at play

between motors on the street.

"Oh, it would be wonderful to have a baby--a boy like Walter must have

been--to nurse and pet and cry over!" she declared, as she watched a

baby of faint, brown ringlets--hair that would be black like Walter's.

Later she chided herself for being so bold, so un-Panamanian; but she

was proud to know that she could long for the pressure of a baby's lips.

The brick-walled street echoed with jagged cries of children; tired

women in mussed waists poked their red, steamy necks out of windows; the

sky was a blur of gray; and, lest she forget the job, Una's left wrist

ached from typing; yet she heard the rustle of spring, and her spirit

swelled with thankfulness as she felt her life to be not a haphazard

series of days, but a divine progress.

Walter was coming--to-night!

She was conscious of her mother, up-stairs. From her place of meditation

she had to crawl up the many steps to the flat and answer at least

twenty questions as to what she had been doing. Of Walter's coming she

could say nothing; she could not admit her interest in a man she did not

know.

At a quarter to nine she ventured to say, ever so casually: "I feel sort

of headachy. I think I'll run down and sit on the steps again and get a

little fresh air."

"Let's have a little walk. I'd like some fresh air, too," said Mrs.

Golden, brightly.

"Why--oh--to tell the truth, I wanted to think over some office

business."

"Oh, of course, my dear, if I am in the _way_--!" Mrs. Golden sighed,

and trailed pitifully off into the bedroom.

Una followed her, and wanted to comfort her. But she could say nothing,

because she was palpitating over Walter's coming. The fifteen minutes of

his stay might hold any splendor.

She could not change her clothes. Her mother was in the bedroom,

sobbing.

All the way down the four flights of stairs she wanted to flee back to

her mother. It was with a cold impatience that she finally saw Walter

approach the house, ten minutes late. He was so grotesque in his

frantic, puffing hurry. He was no longer the brilliant Mr. Babson, but a

moist young man who hemmed and sputtered, "Gee!--couldn't find clean

collar--hustled m' head off--just missed Subway express--couldn't make

it--whew, I'm hot!"

"It doesn't matter," she condescended.

He dropped on the step just below her and mopped his forehead. Neither

of them could say anything. He took off his horn-rimmed eye-glasses,

carefully inserted the point of a pencil through the loop, swung them in

a buzzing circle, and started to put them on again.

"Oh, keep them _off_!" she snapped. "You look so high-brow with them!"

"Y-yuh; why, s-sure!"

She felt very superior.

He feverishly ran a finger along the upper rim of his left ear, sprang

up, stooped to take her hand, glared into her eyes till she shrank--and

then a nail-cleaner, a common, ten-cent file, fell out of his inner

pocket and clinked on the stone step.

"Oh, damn!" he groaned.

"I really think it _is_ going to rain," she said.

They both laughed.

He plumped down beside her, uncomfortably wedged between her and the

rail. He caught her hand, intertwined their fingers so savagely that

her knuckles hurt. "Look here," he commanded, "you don't really think

it's going to rain any such a darn thing! I've come fourteen billion hot

miles up here for just fifteen minutes--yes, and you wanted to see me

yourself, too! And now you want to talk about the history of recent

rains."

In the bitter-sweet spell of his clasp she was oblivious of street,

children, sky. She tried to withdraw her hand, but he squeezed her

fingers the more closely and their two hands dropped on her thin knee,

which tingled to the impact.

"But--but what did you want to see me about?" Her superiority was burnt

away.

He answered her hesitation with a trembling demand. "I can't talk to you

here! Can't we go some place-- Come walk toward the river."

"Oh, I daren't really, Walter. My mother feels so--so fidgety to-night

and I must go back to her.... By and by."

"But would you like to go with me?"

"Yes!"

"Then that's all that matters!"

"Perhaps--perhaps we could go up on the roof here for just a few

minutes. Then I must send you home."

"Hooray! Come on."

He boldly lifted her to her feet, followed her up the stairs. On the

last dark flight, near the roof, he threw both arms about her and kissed

her. She was amazed that she did not want to kiss him back, that his

abandon did not stir her. Even while she was shocked and afraid, he

kissed again, and she gave way to his kiss; her cold mouth grew

desirous.

She broke away, with shocked pride--shocked most of all at herself, that

she let him kiss her thus.

"You quiver so to my kiss!" he whispered, in awe.

"I don't!" she denied. "It just doesn't mean anything."

"It does, and you know it does. I had to kiss you. Oh, sweetheart,

sweetheart, we are both so lonely! Kiss me."

"No, no!" She held him away from her.

"Yes, I tell you!"

She encircled his neck with her arm, laid her cheek beside his chin,

rejoiced boundlessly in the man roughness of his chin, of his

coat-sleeve, the man scent of him--scent of tobacco and soap and hair.

She opened her lips to his. Slowly she drew her arm from about his neck,

his arm from about her waist.

"Walter!" she mourned, "I did want you. But you must be good to me--not

kiss me like that--not now, anyway, when I'm lonely for you and can't

resist you.... Oh, it wasn't wrong, was it, when we needed each other

so? It wasn't wrong, was it?"

"Oh no--no!"

"But not--not again--not for a long while. I want you to respect me.

Maybe it wasn't wrong, dear, but it was terribly dangerous. Come, let's

stand out in the cool air on the roof for a while and then you must go

home."

They came out on the flat, graveled roof, round which all the glory of

the city was blazing, and hand in hand, in a confidence delicately happy

now, stood worshiping the spring.

"Dear," he said, "I feel as though I were a robber who had gone crashing

right through the hedge around your soul, and then after that come out

in a garden--the sweetest, coolest garden.... I _will_ try to be good to

you--and for you." He kissed her finger-tips.

"Yes, you did break through. At first it was just a kiss and the--oh, it

was _the_ kiss, and there wasn't anything else. Oh, do let me live in

the little garden still."

"Trust me, dear."

"I will trust you. Come. I must go down now."

"Can I come to see you?"

"Yes."

"Goldie, listen," he said, as they came down-stairs to her hallway. "Any

time you'd like to marry me--I don't advise it, I guess I'd have good

intentions, but be a darn poor hand at putting up shelves--but any time

you'd like to marry me, or any of those nice conventional things, just

lemme know, will you? Not that it matters much. What matters is, I want

to kiss you good-night."

"No, what matters is, I'm not going to let you!... Not to-night....

Good-night, dear."

She scampered down the hall. She tiptoed into the living-room, and for

an hour she brooded, felt faint and ashamed at her bold response to his

kiss, yet wanted to feel his sharp-ridged lips again. Sometimes in a

bitter frankness she told herself that Walter had never even thought of

marriage till their kiss had fired him. She swore to herself that she

would not give all her heart to love; that she would hold him off and

make him value her precious little store of purity and tenderness. But

passion and worry together were lost in a prayer for him. She knelt by

the window till her own individuality was merged with that of the city's

million lovers.

§ 3

Like sickness and war, the office grind absorbs all personal desires.

Love and ambition and wisdom it turns to its own purposes. Every day Una

and Walter saw each other. Their hands touched as he gave her papers to

file; there was affection in his voice when he dictated, and once,

outside the office door, he kissed her. Yet their love was kept

suspended. They could not tease each other and flirt raucously, like the

telephone-girl and the elevator-starter.

Every day he begged her to go to dinner with him, to let him call at the

flat, and after a week she permitted him to come.

§ 4

At dinner, when Una told her mother that a young gentleman at the

office--in fact, Mr. Babson, the editor whose dictation she took--was

going to call that evening, Mrs. Golden looked pleased, and said: "Isn't

that nice! Why, you never told mother he was interested in you!"

"Well, of course, we kind of work together--"

"I do hope he's a nice, respectful young man, not one of these city

people that flirt and drink cocktails and heaven knows what all!"

"Why, uh--I'm sure you'll like him. Everybody says he's the cleverest

fellow in the shop."

"Office, dear, not shop.... Is he-- Does he get a big salary?"

"Why, mums, I'm sure I haven't the slightest idea! How should I know?"

"Well, I just asked.... Will you put on your pink-and-white crêpe?"

"Don't you think the brown silk would be better?"

"Why, Una, I want you to look your prettiest! You must make all the

impression you can."

"Well, perhaps I'd better," Una said, demurely.

Despite her provincial training, Mrs. Golden had a much better instinct

for dress than her sturdy daughter. So long as she was not left at home

alone, her mild selfishness did not make her want to interfere with

Una's interests. She ah'd and oh'd over the torn border of Una's crêpe

dress, and mended it with quick, pussy-like movements of her fingers.

She tried to arrange Una's hair so that its pale golden texture would

shine in broad, loose undulations, and she was as excited as Una when

they heard Walter's bouncing steps in the hall, his nervous tap at the

door, his fumbling for a push-button.

Una dashed wildly to the bedroom for a last nose-powdering, a last

glance at her hair and nails, and slowly paraded to the door to let him

in, while Mrs. Golden stood primly, with folded hands, like a cabinet

photograph of 1885.

So the irregular Walter came into a decidedly regular atmosphere and had

to act like a pure-minded young editor.

They conversed--Lord! how they conversed! Mrs. Golden respectably

desired to know Mr. Babson's opinions on the weather, New-Yorkers, her

little girl Una's work, fashionable city ministers, the practical value

of motor-cars, and the dietetic value of beans--the large, white beans,

not the small, brown ones--she had grown both varieties in her garden at

home (Panama, Pennsylvania, when Mr. Golden, Captain Golden he was

usually called, was alive)--and had Mr. Babson ever had a garden, or

seen Panama? And was Una _really_ attending to her duties?

All the while Mrs. Golden's canary trilled approval of the conversation.

Una listened, numbed, while Walter kept doing absurd things with his

face--pinched his lips and tapped his teeth and rubbed his jaw as though

he needed a shave. He took off his eye-glasses to wipe them and tied

his thin legs in a knot, and all the while said, "Yes, there's

certainly a great deal to that."

At a quarter to ten Mrs. Golden rose, indulged in a little kitten yawn

behind her silvery hand, and said: "Well, I think I must be off to

bed.... I find these May days so languid. Don't you, Mr. Babson? Spring

fever. I just can't seem to get enough sleep.... Now you mustn't stay up

_too_ late, Una dear."

The bedroom door had not closed before Walter had darted from his chair,

picked Una up, his hands pressing tight about her knees and shoulders,

kissed her, and set her down beside him on the couch.

"Wasn't I good, huh? Wasn't I good, huh? Wasn't I? Now who says Wally

Babson ain't a good parlor-pup, huh? Oh, you old darling, you were twice

as agonized as me!"

And that was all he said--in words. Between them was a secret, a greater

feeling of unfettered intimacy, because together they had been polite to

mother--tragic, pitiful mother, who had been enjoying herself so much

without knowing that she was in the way. That intimacy needed no words

to express it; hands and cheeks and lips spoke more truly. They were

children of emotion, young and crude and ignorant, groping for life and

love, all the world new to them, despite their sorrows and waiting. They

were clerklings, not lords of love and life, but all the more easily did

they yield to longing for happiness. Between them was the battle of

desire and timidity--and not all the desire was his, not hers all the

timidity. She fancied sometimes that he was as much afraid as was she of

debasing their shy seeking into unveiled passion. Yet his was the

initiative; always she panted and wondered what he would do next, feared

and wondered and rebuked--and desired.

He abruptly drew her head to his shoulder, smoothed her hair. She felt

his fingers again communicate to her every nerve a tingling electric

force. She felt his lips quest along her cheek and discover the soft

little spot just behind her ear. She followed the restless course of his

hands across her shoulders, down her arm, lingeringly over her hand. His

hand seemed to her to have an existence quite apart from him, to have a

mysterious existence of its own. In silence they rested there. She kept

wondering if his shoulder had not been made just for her cheek. With

little shivers she realized that this was his shoulder, Walter's, a

man's, as the rough cloth prickled her skin. Silent they were, and for a

time secure, but she kept speculating as to what he would dare to do

next--and she fancied that he was speculating about precisely the same

thing.

He drew a catching breath, and suddenly her lips were opening to his.

"Oh, you mustn't--you promised--" she moaned, when she was able to draw

back her head.

Again he kissed her, quickly, then released her and began to talk

rapidly of--nothing. Apropos of offices and theaters and the tides of

spring, he was really telling her that, powerful though his restless

curiosity was, greatly though their poor little city bodies craved each

other, yet he did respect her. She scarce listened, for at first she was

bemused by two thoughts. She was inquiring sorrowfully whether it was

only her body that stirred him--whether he found any spark in her honest

little mind. And, for her second thought, she was considering in an

injured way that this was not love as she had read of it in novels. "I

didn't know just what it would be--but I didn't think it would be like

this," she declared.

Love, as depicted in such American novels by literary pastors and

matrons of perfect purity as had sifted into the Panama public library,

was an affair of astounding rescues from extreme peril, of highly proper

walks in lanes, of laudable industry on the part of the hero, and of not

more than three kisses--one on the brow, one on the cheek, and, in the

very last paragraph of the book, one daringly but reverently deposited

upon the lips. These young heroes and heroines never thought about

bodies at all, except when they had been deceived in a field of

asterisks. So to Una there was the world-old shock at the earthiness of

love--and the penetrating joy of that earthiness. If real love was so

much more vulgar than she had supposed, yet also it was so much more

overwhelming that she was glad to be a flesh-and-blood lover, bruised

and bewildered and estranged from herself, instead of a polite murmurer.

Gradually she was drawn back into a real communion with him when he

damned the human race for serfs fighting in a dungeon, warring for land,

for flags, for titles, and calling themselves kings. Walter took the

same theories of socialism, single-tax, unionism, which J. J. Todd, of

Chatham, had hacked out in commercial-college days, and he made them

bleed and yawp and be hotly human. For the first time--Walter was giving

her so many of those First Times of life!--Una realized how strong is

the demand of the undermen for a conscious and scientific justice. She

denied that stenographers could ever form a union, but she could not

answer his acerb, "Why not?"

It was not in the patiently marching Una to be a creative thinker, yet

she did hunger for self-mastery, and ardently was she following the

erratic gibes at civilization with which young Walter showed his delight

in having an audience, when the brown, homely Golden family clock struck

eleven.

"Heavens!" she cried. "You must run home at once. Good-night, dear."

He rose obediently, nor did their lips demand each other again.

Her mother awoke to yawn. "He is a very polite young man, but I don't

think he is solid enough for you, dearie. If he comes again, do remind

me to show him the kodaks of your father, like I promised."

Then Una began to ponder the problem which is so weighty to girls of the

city--where she could see her lover, since the parks were impolite and

her own home obtrusively dull to him.

Whether Walter was a peril or not, whether or not his love was angry and

red and full of hurts, yet she knew that it was more to her than her

mother or her conventions or her ambitious little job. Thus gladly

confessing, she fell asleep, and a new office day began, for always the

office claims one again the moment that the evening's freedom is over.

CHAPTER VII

These children of the city, where there is no place for love-making, for

discovering and testing each other's hidden beings, ran off together in

the scanted parties of the ambitious poor. Walter was extravagant

financially as he was mentally, but he had many debts, some conscience,

and a smallness of salary. She was pleased by the smallest diversions,

however, and found luxury in a bowl of chop-suey. He took her to an

Italian restaurant and pointed out supposititious artists. They had

gallery seats for a Maude Adams play, at which she cried and laughed

whole-heartedly and held his hand all through. Her first real tea was

with him--in Panama one spoke of "ladies' afternoon tea," not of "tea."

She was awed by his new walking-stick and the new knowledge of cinnamon

toast which he displayed for her. She admired, too, the bored way he

swung his stick as they sauntered into and out of the lobbies of the

great hotels.

The first flowers from a real florist's which she had ever received,

except for a bunch of carnations from Henry Carson at Panama high-school

commencement, came from Walter--long-stemmed roses in damp paper and a

florist's box, with Walter's card inside.

And perhaps the first time that she had ever really seen spring, felt

the intense light of sky and cloud and fresh greenery as her own, was on

a Sunday just before the fragrant first of June, when Walter and she

slipped away from her mother and walked in Central Park, shabby but

unconscious.

She explored with him, too; felt adventurous in quite respectable

Japanese and Greek and Syrian restaurants.

But her mother waited for her at home, and the job, the office, the

desk, demanded all her energy.

Had they seen each other less frequently, perhaps Walter would have let

dreams serve for real kisses, and have been satisfied. But he saw her a

hundred times a day--and yet their love progressed so little. The

propinquity of the office tantalized them. And Mrs. Golden kept them

apart.

§ 2

The woman who had aspired and been idle while Captain Golden had toiled

for her, who had mourned and been idle while Una had planned for her,

and who had always been a compound of selfishness and love, was more and

more accustomed to taking her daughter's youth to feed her comfort and

her canary--a bird of atrophied voice and uncleanly habit.

If this were the history of the people who wait at home, instead of the

history of the warriors, rich credit would be given to Mrs. Golden for

enduring the long, lonely days, listening for Una's step. A proud,

patient woman with nothing to do all day but pick at a little housework,

and read her eyes out, and wish that she could run in and be neighborly

with the indifferent urbanites who formed about her a wall of ice. Yet

so confused are human purposes that this good woman who adored her

daughter also sapped her daughter's vigor. As the office loomed behind

all of Una's desires, so behind the office, in turn, was ever the

shadowy thought of the appealing figure there at home; and toward her

mother Una was very compassionate.

Yes, and so was her mother!

Mrs. Golden liked to sit soft and read stories of young love. Partly by

nature and partly because she had learned that thus she could best

obtain her wishes, she was gentle as a well-filled cat and delicate as a

tulle scarf. She was admiringly adhesive to Una as she had been to

Captain Golden, and she managed the new master of the house just as she

had managed the former one. She listened to dictates pleasantly, was

perfectly charmed at suggestions that she do anything, and then

gracefully forgot.

Mrs. Golden was a mistress of graceful forgetting. Almost never did she

remember to do anything she didn't want to do. She did not lie about it;

she really and quite beautifully did forget.

Una, hurrying off to the office every morning, agonized with the effort

to be on time, always had to stop and prepare a written list of the

things her mother was to do. Otherwise, bespelled by the magazine

stories which she kept forgetting and innocently rereading, Mrs. Golden

would forget the marketing, forget to put the potatoes on to boil,

forget to scrub the bathroom.... And she often contrived to lose the

written list, and searched for it, with trembling lips but no vast

persistence.

Una, bringing home the palsying weariness of the day's drudgery, would

find a cheery welcome--and the work not done; no vegetables for dinner,

no fresh boric-acid solution prepared for washing her stinging eyes.

Nor could Una herself get the work immediately out of the way, because

her mother was sure to be lonely, to need comforting before Una could

devote herself to anything else or even wash away the sticky office

grime.... Mrs. Golden would have been shocked into a stroke could she

have known that while Una was greeting her, she was muttering within

herself, "I do wish I could brush my teeth first!"

If Una was distraught, desirous of disappearing in order to get hold of

herself, Mrs. Golden would sigh, "Dear, have I done something to make

you angry?" In any case, whether Una was silent or vexed with her, the

mother would manage to be hurt but brave; sweetly distressed, but never

quite tearful. And Una would have to kiss her, pat her hair, before she

could escape and begin to get dinner (with her mother helping, always

ready to do anything that Una's doggedly tired mind might suggest, but

never suggesting novelties herself).

After dinner, Mrs. Golden was always ready to do whatever Una wished--to

play cribbage, or read aloud, or go for a walk--not a _long_ walk; she

was so delicate, you know, but a nice _little_ walk with her dear, dear

daughter.... For such amusements she was ready to give up all her own

favorite evening diversions--namely, playing solitaire, and reading and

taking nice little walks.... But she did not like to have Una go out and

leave her, nor have naughty, naughty men like Walter take Una to the

theater, as though they wanted to steal the dear daughter away. And she

wore Una's few good frocks, and forgot to freshen them in time for Una

to wear them. Otherwise, Mrs. Golden had the unselfishness of a saint on

a marble pillar.

Una, it is true, sometimes voiced her irritation over her mother's

forgetfulness and her subsequent pathos, but for that bitterness she

always blamed herself, with horror remembered each cutting word she had

said to the Little Mother Saint (as, in still hours when they sat

clasped like lovers, she tremblingly called her).

§ 3

Mrs. Golden's demand of Una for herself had never been obvious till it

clashed with Walter's demand.

Una and Walter talked it over, but they seemed mutely to agree, after

the evening of Mrs. Golden and conversation, that it was merely balking

for him to call at the flat. Nor did Una and Mrs. Golden discuss why Mr.

Babson did not come again, or whether Una was seeing him. Una was

accustomed to say only that she would be "away this evening," but over

the teapot she quoted Walter's opinions on Omar, agnosticism, motor

magazines, pipe-smoking, Staten Island, and the Himalayas, and it was

evident that she was often with him.

Mrs. Golden's method of opposition was very simple. Whenever Una

announced that she was going out, her mother's bright, birdlike eyes

filmed over; she sighed and hesitated, "Shall I be alone all

evening--after all day, too?" Una felt like a brute. She tried to get

her mother to go to the Sessionses' flat more often, to make new

friends, but Mrs. Golden had lost all her adaptability. She clung to Una

and to her old furniture as the only recognizable parts of her world.

Often Una felt forced to refuse Walter's invitations; always she refused

to walk with him on the long, splendid Saturday afternoons of freedom.

Nor would she let him come and sit on the roof with her, lest her mother

see them in the hall and be hurt.

So it came to pass that only in public did she meet Walter. He showed

his resentment by inviting her out less and less, by telling her less

and less frankly his ambitions and his daily dabs at becoming a great

man. Apparently he was rather interested in a flour-faced actress at

his boarding-house.

Never, now, did he speak of marriage. The one time when he had spoken of

it, Una had been so sure of their happiness that she had thought no more

of that formality than had his reckless self. But now she yearned to

have him "propose," in the most stupid, conventional, pink-romance

fashion. "Why can't we be married?" she fancied herself saying to him,

but she never dared say it aloud.

Often he was abstracted when he was with her, in the office or out.

Always he was kindly, but the kindliness seemed artificial. She could

not read his thoughts, now that she had no hand-clasp to guide her.

On a hot, quivering afternoon of early July, Walter came to her desk at

closing-hour and said, abruptly: "Look. You've simply _got_ to come out

with me this evening. We'll dine at a little place at the foot of the

Palisades. I can't stand seeing you so little. I won't ask you again!

You aren't fair."

"Oh, I don't mean to be unfair--"

"Will you come? Will you?"

His voice glared. Regardless of the office folk about them, he put his

hand over hers. She was sure that Miss Moynihan was bulkily watching

them. She dared not take time to think.

"Yes," she said, "I will go."

§ 4

It was a beer-garden frequented by yachtless German yachtsmen in

shirt-sleeves, boating-caps, and mustaches like muffs, but to Una it was

Europe and the banks of the Rhine, that restaurant below the Palisades

where she dined with Walter.

A placid hour it was, as dusk grew deeper and more fragrant, and they

leaned over the terrace rail to meditate on the lights springing out

like laughing jests incarnate--reflected lights of steamers paddling

with singing excursionists up the Hudson to the storied hills of Rip Van

Winkle; imperial sweeps of fire that outlined the mighty city across the

river.

Walter was at peace. He spared her his swart intensity; he shyly quoted

Tennyson, and bounced with cynicisms about "Sherbert Souse" and "the

_Gas-bag_." He brought happiness to her, instead of the agitation of his

kisses.

She was not an office machine now, but one with the village lovers of

poetry, as her job-exhaustion found relief in the magic of the hour, in

the ancient music of the river, in breezes which brought old tales down

from the Catskills.

She would have been content to sit there for hours, listening to the

twilight, absently pleating the coarse table-cloth, trying to sip the

saline claret which he insisted on their drinking. She wanted nothing

more.... And she had so manoeuvered their chairs that the left side of

her face, the better side, was toward him!

But Walter grew restless. He stared at the German yachtsmen, at their

children who ate lumps of sugar dipped in claret, and their wives who

drank beer. He commented needlessly on a cat which prowled along the

terrace rail. He touched Una's foot with his, and suddenly condemned

himself for not having been able to bring her to a better restaurant. He

volubly pointed out that their roast chicken had been petrified--"vile

restaurant, very vile food."

"Why, I love it here!" she protested. "I'm perfectly happy to be just

like this."

As she turned to him with a smile that told all her tenderness, she

noted how his eyes kept stealing from the riverside to her, and back

again, how his hands trembled as he clapped two thick glass salt-shakers

together. A current of uneasiness darted between them.

He sprang up. "Oh, I can't sit still!" he said. "Come on. Let's walk

down along the river."

"Oh, can't we just sit here and be quiet?" she pleaded, but he rubbed

his chin and shook his head and sputtered: "Oh, rats, you can't see the

river, now that they've turned on the electric lights here. Come on.

Besides, it'll be cooler right by the river."

She felt a menace; the darkness beyond them was no longer dreaming, but

terror-filled. She wanted to refuse, but he was so fretfully demanding

that she could only obey him.

Up on the crest of the Palisades is an "amusement park," and suburbs and

crowded paths; and across the river is New York, in a solid mass of

apartment-houses; but between Palisades and river, at the foot of the

cliffs, is an unfrequented path which still keeps some of the wildness

it had when it was a war-path of the Indians. It climbs ridges, twists

among rocks, dips into damp hollows, widens out into tiny bowling-greens

for Hendrik Hudson's fairy men. By night it is ghostly, and beside it

the river whispers strange tragedies.

Along this path the city children crept, unspeaking, save when his two

hands, clasping her waist to guide her down a rocky descent, were

clamorous.

Where a bare sand jetty ran from the path out into the river's broad

current, Walter stopped and whispered, "I wish we could go swimming."

"I wish we could--it's quite warm," she said, prosaically.

But river and dark woods and breeze overhead seemed to whisper to

her--whisper, whisper, all the shrouded night aquiver with low, eager

whispers. She shivered to find herself imagining the unimaginable--that

she might throw off her stodgy office clothes, her dull cloth skirt and

neat blouse, and go swimming beside him, revel in giving herself up to

the utter frankness of cool water laving her bare flesh.

She closed her mind. She did not condemn herself for wanting to bathe as

Mother Eve had bathed, naked and unafraid. She did not condemn

herself--but neither did she excuse. She was simply afraid. She dared

not try to make new standards; she took refuge in the old standards of

the good little Una. Though all about her called the enticing voices of

night and the river, yet she listened for the tried counsel voices of

the plain Panama streets and the busy office.

While she struggled, Walter stood with his arm fitted about her

shoulder, letting the pregnant silence speak, till again he insisted:

"Why couldn't we go swimming?" Then, with all the cruelly urgent lovers

of the days of hungry poetry: "We're going to let youth go by and never

dare to be mad. Time will get us--we'll be old--it will be too late to

enjoy being mad." His lyric cry dropped to a small-boy excuse: "Besides,

it wouldn't hurt.... Come on. Think of plunging in."

"No, no, no, no!" she cried, and ran from him up the jetty, back to the

path.... She was not afraid of him, because she was so much more afraid

of herself.

He followed sullenly as the path led them farther and farther. She

stopped on a rise, and found herself able to say, calmly, "Don't you

think we'd better go back now?"

"Maybe we ought to. But sit down here."

He hunched up his knees, rested his elbows on them, and said,

abstractedly, apparently talking to himself as much as to her:

"I'm sorry I've been so grouchy coming down the path. But I _don't_

apologize for wanting us to go swimming. Civilization, the world's

office-manager, tells us to work like fiends all day and be lonely and

respectable all evening, and not even marry till we're thirty, because

we can't afford to! That's all right for them as likes to become nice

varnished desks, but not for me! I'm going to hunger and thirst and

satisfy my appetites--even if it makes me selfish as the devil. I'd

rather be that than be a bran-stuffed automaton that's never human

enough to hunger. But of course you're naturally a Puritan and always

will be one, no matter what you do. You're a good sort-- I'd trust you to

the limit--you're sincere and you want to grow. But me--my Wanderjahr

isn't over yet. Maybe some time we'll again-- I admire you, but--if I

weren't a little mad I'd go literally mad.... Mad--mad!"

He suddenly undid the first button of her blouse and kissed her neck

harshly, while she watched him, in a maze. He abruptly fastened the

button again, sprang up, stared out at the wraith-filled darkness over

the river, while his voice droned on, as though it were a third person

speaking:

"I suppose there's a million cases a year in New York of crazy young

chaps making violent love to decent girls and withdrawing because they

have some hidden decency themselves. I'm ashamed that I'm one of

them--me, I'm as bad as a nice little Y. M. C. A. boy--I bow to

conventions, too. Lordy! the fact that I'm so old-fashioned as even to

talk about 'conventions' in this age of Shaw and d'Annunzio shows that

I'm still a small-town, district-school radical! I'm really as

mid-Victorian as you are, in knowledge. Only I'm modern by instinct, and

the combination will always keep me half-baked, I suppose. I don't know

what I want from life, and if I did I wouldn't know how to get it. I'm a

Middle Western farmer, and yet I regard myself about half the time as an

Oxford man with a training in Paris. You're lucky, girl. You have a

definite ambition--either to be married and have babies or to boss an

office. Whatever I did, I'd spoil you--at least I would till I found

myself--found out what I wanted.... _Lord!_ how I hope I do find myself

some day!"

"Poor boy!" she suddenly interrupted; "it's all right. Come, we'll go

home and try to be good."

"Wonderful! There speaks the American woman, perfectly. You think I'm

just chattering. You can't understand that I was never so desperately in

earnest in my life. Well, to come down to cases. Specification A--I

couldn't marry you, because we haven't either of us got any money--aside

from my not having found myself yet. Ditto B--We can't play, just

because you _are_ a Puritan and I'm a typical intellectual climber. Same

C--I've actually been offered a decent job in the advertising department

of a motor-car company in Omaha, and now I think I'll take it."

And that was all that he really had to say, just that last sentence,

though for more than an hour they discussed themselves and their

uncharted world, Walter trying to be honest, yet to leave with her a

better impression of himself; Una trying to keep him with her. It was

hard for her to understand that Walter really meant all he said.

But, like him, she was frank.

There are times in any perplexed love when the lovers revel in bringing

out just those problems and demands and complaints which they have most

carefully concealed. At such a time of mutual confession, if the lovers

are honest and tender, there is none of the abrasive hostility of a

vulgar quarrel. But the kindliness of the review need not imply that it

is profitable; often it ends, as it began, with the wail, "What can we

do?" But so much alike are all the tribe of lovers, that the debaters

never fail to stop now and then to congratulate themselves on being so

frank!

Thus Una and Walter, after a careful survey of the facts that he was too

restless, that she was too Panamanian and too much mothered, after much

argument as to what he had meant when he had said this, and what she had

thought he meant when he had said that, and whether he could ever have

been so inconsiderate as to have said the other, and frequent admiration

of themselves for their open-mindedness, the questing lovers were of the

same purpose as at the beginning of their inquiry. He still felt the

urge to take up his pilgrimage again, to let the "decent job" and Omaha

carry him another stage in his search for the shrouded gods of his

nebulous faith. And she still begged for a chance to love, to be needed;

still declared that he was merely running away from himself.

They had quite talked themselves out before he sighed: "I don't dare to

look and see what time it is. Come, we'll have to go."

They swung arms together shyly as they stumbled back over the path. She

couldn't believe that he really would go off to the West, of which she

was so ignorant. But she felt as though she were staggering into a

darkness blinder and ever more blind.

When she got home she found her mother awake, very angry over Una's

staying out till after midnight, and very wordy about the fact that

"that nice, clean young man," Mr. J. J. Todd, of Chatham and of the

commercial college, had come to call that evening. Una made little

answer to her. Through her still and sacred agony she could scarce hear

her mother's petulant whining.

§ 5

Next morning at the office, Walter abruptly asked her to come out into

the hall, told her that he was leaving without notice that afternoon. He

could never bear to delay, once he had started out on the "Long Trail,"

he said, not looking at her. He hastily kissed her, and darted back into

the office. She did not see him again till, at five-thirty, he gave

noisy farewell to all the adoring stenographers and office-boys, and

ironical congratulations to his disapproving chiefs. He stopped at her

desk, hesitated noticeably, then said, "Good-by, Goldie," and passed on.

She stared, hypnotized, as, for the last time, Walter went bouncing out

of the office.

§ 6

A week later J. J. Todd called on her again. He was touching in his

description of his faithful labor for the Charity Organization Society.

But she felt dead; she could not get herself to show approval. It was

his last call.

§ 7

Walter wrote to her on the train--a jumbled rhapsody on missing her

honest companionship. Then a lively description of his new chief at

Omaha. A lonely letter on a barren evening, saying that there was

nothing to say. A note about a new project of going to Alaska. She did

not hear from him again.

§ 8

For weeks she missed him so tragically that she found herself muttering

over and over, "Now I sha'n't ever have a baby that would be a little

image of him."

When she thought of the shy games and silly love-words she had lavished,

she was ashamed, and wondered if they had made her seem a fool to him.

But presently in the week's unchanging routine she found an untroubled

peace; and in mastering her work she had more comfort than ever in his

clamorous summons.

At home she tried not merely to keep her mother from being lonely, but

actually to make her happy, to coax her to break into the formidable

city. She arranged summer-evening picnics with the Sessionses.

She persuaded them to hold one of these picnics at the foot of the

Palisades. During it she disappeared for nearly half an hour. She sat

alone by the river. Suddenly, with a feverish wrench, she bared her

breast, then shook her head angrily, rearranged her blouse, went back to

the group, and was unusually gay, though all the while she kept her left

hand on her breast, as though it pained her.

She had been with the _Gazette_ for only a little over six months, and

she was granted only a week's vacation. This she spent with her mother

at Panama. In parties with old neighbors she found sweetness, and on a

motor-trip with Henry Carson and his fiancée, a young widow, she let the

fleeting sun-flecked land absorb her soul.

At the office Una was transferred to S. Herbert Ross's department, upon

Walter's leaving. She sometimes took S. Herbert's majestic, flowing

dictation. She tried not merely to obey his instructions, but also to

discover his unvoiced wishes. Her wage was raised from eight dollars a

week to ten. She again determined to be a real business woman. She read

a small manual on advertising.

But no one in the _Gazette_ office believed that a woman could bear

responsibilities, not even S. Herbert Ross, with his aphorisms for

stenographers, his prose poems about the ecstatic joy of running a

typewriter nine hours a day, which appeared in large, juicy-looking type

in business magazines.

She became bored, mechanical, somewhat hopeless. She planned to find a

better job and resign. In which frame of mind she was rather

contemptuous of the _Gazette_ office; and it was an unforgettable shock

suddenly to be discharged.

Ross called her in, on a winter afternoon, told her that he had orders

from the owner to "reduce the force," because of a "change of policy,"

and that, though he was sorry, he would have to "let her go because she

was one of the most recent additions." He assured her royally that he

had been pleased by her work; that he would be glad to give her "the

best kind of a recommend--and if the situation loosens up again, I'd be

tickled to death to have you drop in and see me. Just between us, I

think the owner will regret this tight-wad policy."

But Mr. S. Herbert Ross continued to go out to lunch with the owner, and

Una went through all the agony of not being wanted even in the prison

she hated. No matter what the reason, being discharged is the final

insult in an office, and it made her timid as she began wildly to seek a

new job.

CHAPTER VIII

In novels and plays architects usually are delicate young men who wear

silky Vandyke beards, play the piano, and do a good deal with pictures

and rugs. They leap with desire to erect charming cottages for the poor,

and to win prize contests for the Jackson County Courthouse. They always

have good taste; they are perfectly mad about simplicity and

gracefulness. But from the number of flat-faced houses and three-toned

wooden churches still being erected, it may be deduced that somewhere

there are architects who are not enervated by too much good taste.

Mr. Troy Wilkins, architect, with an office in the Septimus Building,

was a commuter. He wore a derby and a clipped mustache, and took

interest in cameras, player-pianos, phonographs, small motor-cars,

speedometers, tires, patent nicotineless pipes, jolly tobacco for

jimmy-pipes, tennis-rackets, correspondence courses, safety-razors,

optimism, Theodore Roosevelt, pocket flashlights, rubber heels, and all

other well-advertised wares. He was a conservative Republican and a

Congregationalist, and on his desk he kept three silver-framed

photographs--one of his wife and two children, one of his dog Rover, and

one of his architectural masterpiece, the mansion of Peter B. Reardon,

the copper king of Montana.

Mr. Troy Wilkins lamented the passing of the solid and expensive stone

residences of the nineties, but he kept "up to date," and he had added

ideals about half-timbered villas, doorway settles, garages, and

sleeping-porches to his repertoire. He didn't, however, as he often

said, "believe in bungalows any more than he believed in these labor

unions."

§ 2

Una Golden had been the chief of Mr. Troy Wilkins's two stenographers

for seven months now--midsummer of 1907, when she was twenty-six. She

had climbed to thirteen dollars a week. The few hundred dollars which

she had received from Captain Golden's insurance were gone, and her

mother and she had to make a science of saving--economize on milk, on

bread, on laundry, on tooth-paste. But that didn't really matter,

because Una never went out except for walks and moving-picture shows,

with her mother. She had no need, no want of clothes to impress

suitors.... She had four worn letters from Walter Babson which she

re-read every week or two; she had her mother and, always, her job.

§ 3

Una, an errand-boy, and a young East-Side Jewish stenographer named

Bessie Kraker made up the office force of Troy Wilkins. The office was

on the eighth floor of the Septimus Building, which is a lean,

jerry-built, flashingly pretentious cement structure with cracking walls

and dirty, tiled hallways.

The smeary, red-gold paint which hides the imperfect ironwork of its

elevators does not hide the fact that they groan like lost souls, and

tremble and jerk and threaten to fall. The Septimus Building is typical

of at least one half of a large city. It was "run up" by a speculative

builder for a "quick turn-over." It is semi-fire-proof, but more semi

than fire-proof. It stands on Nassau Street, between two portly stone

buildings that try to squeeze this lanky impostor to death, but there is

more cheerful whistling in its hallways than in the halls of its

disapproving neighbors. Near it is City Hall Park and Newspaper Row,

Wall Street and the lordly Stock Exchange, but, aside from a few dull

and honest tenants like Mr. Troy Wilkins, the Septimus Building is

filled with offices of fly-by-night companies--shifty promoters,

mining-concerns, beauty-parlors for petty brokers, sample-shoe shops,

discreet lawyers, and advertising dentists. Seven desks in one large

room make up the entire headquarters of eleven international

corporations, which possess, as capital, eleven hundred and thirty

dollars, much embossed stationery--and the seven desks. These modest

capitalists do not lease their quarters by the year. They are doing very

well if they pay rent for each of four successive months. But also they

do not complain about repairs; they are not fussy about demanding a

certificate of moral perfection from the janitor. They speak cheerily to

elevator-boys and slink off into saloons. Not all of them keep Yom

Kippur; they all talk of being "broad-minded."

Mr. Wilkins's office was small and agitated. It consisted of two rooms

and an insignificant entry-hall, in which last was a water-cooler, a

postal scale, a pile of newspapers, and a morose office-boy who drew

copies of Gibson girls all day long on stray pieces of wrapping-paper,

and confided to Una, at least once a week, that he wanted to take a

correspondence course in window-dressing. In one of the two rooms Mr.

Wilkins cautiously made drawings at a long table, or looked surprised

over correspondence at a small old-fashioned desk, or puffed and

scratched as he planned form-letters to save his steadily waning

business.

In the other room there were the correspondence-files, and the desks of

Una, the chief stenographer, and of slangy East-Side Bessie Kraker, who

conscientiously copied form-letters, including all errors in them, and

couldn't, as Wilkins complainingly pointed out, be trusted with

dictation which included any words more difficult than "sincerely."

From their window the two girls could see the windows of an office

across the street. About once a month an interesting curly-haired youth

leaned out of one of the windows opposite. Otherwise there was no view.

§ 4

Twelve o'clock, the hour at which most of the offices closed on Saturday

in summer, was excitedly approaching. The office-women throughout the

Septimus Building, who had been showing off their holiday frocks all

morning, were hastily finishing letters, or rushing to the women's

wash-rooms to discuss with one another the hang of new skirts. All

morning Bessie Kraker had kept up a monologue, beginning, "Say, lis-ten,

Miss Golden, say, gee! I was goin' down to South Beach with my gentleman

friend this afternoon, and, say, what d'you think the piker had to go

and get stuck for? He's got to work all afternoon. I don't care--I don't

care! I'm going to Coney Island with Sadie, and I bet you we pick up

some fellows and do the light fantastic till one G. M. Oh, you sad sea

waves! I bet Sadie and me make 'em sad!"

"But we'll be straight," said Bessie, half an hour later, apropos of

nothing. "But gee! it's fierce to not have any good times without you

take a risk. But gee! my dad would kill me if I went wrong. He reads

the Talmud all the time, and hates Goys. But gee! I can't stand it all

the time being a mollycoddle. I wisht I was a boy! I'd be a' aviator."

Bessie had a proud new blouse with a deep V, the edges of which gaped a

bit and suggested that by ingenuity one could see more than was evident

at first. Troy Wilkins, while pretending to be absent-mindedly fussing

about a correspondence-file that morning, had forgotten that he was much

married and had peered at the V. Una knew it, and the sordidness of that

curiosity so embarrassed her that she stopped typing to clutch at the

throat of her own high-necked blouse, her heart throbbing. She wanted to

run away. She had a vague desire to "help" Bessie, who purred at poor,

good Mr. Wilkins and winked at Una and chewed gum enjoyably, who was

brave and hardy and perfectly able to care for herself--an organism

modified by the Ghetto to the life which still bewildered Una.

Mr. Wilkins went home at 11.17, after giving them enough work to last

till noon. The office-boy chattily disappeared two minutes later, while

Bessie went two minutes after that. Her delay was due to the adjustment

of her huge straw hat, piled with pink roses and tufts of blue malines.

Una stayed till twelve. Her ambition had solidified into an unreasoning

conscientiousness.

With Bessie gone, the office was so quiet that she hesitated to

typewrite lest They sneak up on her--They who dwell in silent offices as

They dwell beneath a small boy's bed at night. The hush was

intimidating; her slightest movement echoed; she stopped the sharply

tapping machine after every few words to listen.

At twelve she put on her hat with two jabs of the hat-pins, and hastened

to the elevator, exulting in freedom. The elevator was crowded with

girls in new white frocks, voluble about their afternoon's plans. One of

them carried a wicker suit-case. She was, she announced, starting on her

two weeks' vacation; there would be some boys, and she was going to have

"a peach of a time."

Una and her mother had again spent a week of June in Panama, and she now

recalled the bright, free mornings and lingering, wonderful twilights.

She had no place to go this holiday afternoon, and she longed to join a

noisy, excited party. Of Walter Babson she did not think. She stubbornly

determined to snatch this time of freedom. Why, of course, she asserted,

she could play by herself quite happily! With a spurious gaiety she

patted her small black hand-bag. She skipped across to the Sixth Avenue

Elevated and went up to the department-store district. She made

elaborate plans for the great adventure of shopping. Bessie Kraker had

insisted, with the nonchalant shrillness of eighteen, that Una "had

ought to wear more color"; and Una had found, in the fashion section of

a woman's magazine, the suggestion for exactly the thing--"a modest,

attractive frock of brown, with smart touches of orange"--and

economical. She had the dress planned--ribbon-belt half brown and half

orange, a collar edged with orange, cuffs slashed with it.

There were a score of mild matter-of-fact Unas on the same Elevated

train with her, in their black hats and black jackets and black skirts

and white waists, with one hint of coquetry in a white-lace jabot or a

white-lace veil; faces slightly sallow or channeled with care, but eyes

that longed to flare with love; women whom life didn't want except to

type its letters about invoices of rubber heels; women who would have

given their salvation for the chance to sacrifice themselves for

love.... And there was one man on that Elevated train, a well-bathed

man with cynical eyes, who read a little book with a florid gold cover,

all about Clytemnestra, because he was certain that modern cities have

no fine romance, no high tragedy; that you must go back to the Greeks

for real feeling. He often aphorized, "Frightfully hackneyed to say,

'woman's place is in the home,' but really, you know, these women going

to offices, vulgarizing all their fine womanliness, and this shrieking

sisterhood going in for suffrage and Lord knows what. Give me the

reticences of the harem rather than one of these office-women with

gum-chewing vacuities. None of them clever enough to be tragic!" He was

ever so whimsical about the way in which the suffrage movement had

cheated him of the chance to find a "_grande amoureuse_." He sat

opposite Una in the train and solemnly read his golden book. He did not

see Una watch with shy desire every movement of a baby that was talking

to its mother in some unknown dialect of baby-land. He was feeling deep

sensations about Clytemnestra's misfortunes--though he controlled his

features in the most gentlemanly manner, and rose composedly at his

station, letting a well-bred glance of pity fall upon the gum-chewers.

Una found a marvelously clean, new restaurant on Sixth Avenue, with lace

curtains at the window and, between the curtains, a red geranium in a

pot covered with red-crêpe paper tied with green ribbon. A new place!

She was tired of the office, the Elevated, the flat on 148th Street, the

restaurants where she tediously had her week-day lunches. She entered

the new restaurant briskly, swinging her black bag. The place had

Personality--the white enameled tables were set diagonally and clothed

with strips of Japanese toweling. Una smiled at a lively photograph of

two bunnies in a basket. With a sensation of freedom and novelty she

ordered coffee, chicken patty, and cocoanut layer-cake.

But the patty and the cake were very much like the hundreds of other

patties and cakes which she had consumed during the past two years, and

the people about her were of the horde of lonely workers who make up

half of New York. The holiday enchantment dissolved. She might as well

be going back to the office grind after lunch! She brooded, while

outside, in that seething summer street, the pageant of life passed by

and no voice summoned her. Men and girls and motors, people who laughed

and waged commerce for the reward of love--they passed her by, life

passed her by, a spectator untouched by joy or noble tragedy, a woman

desperately hungry for life.

She began--but not bitterly, she was a good little thing, you know--to

make the old familiar summary. She had no lover, no friend, no future.

Walter--he might be dead, or married. Her mother and the office, between

them, left her no time to seek lover or friend or success. She was a

prisoner of affection and conscience.

She rose and paid her check. She did not glance at the picture of the

bunnies in a basket. She passed out heavily, a woman of sterile sorrow.

§ 5

Una recovered her holiday by going shopping. An aisle-man in the

dress-goods department, a magnificent creature in a braided

morning-coat, directed her to the counter she asked for, spoke

eloquently of woolen voiles, picked up her bag, and remarked, "Yes, we

do manage to keep it cool here, even on the hottest days." A shop-girl

laughed with her. She stole into one of the elevators, and, though she

really should have gone home to her mother, she went into the music

department, where, among lattices wreathed with newly dusted roses, she

listened to waltzes and two-steps played by a red-haired girl who was

chewing gum and talking to a man while she played. The music roused Una

to plan a wild dissipation. She would pretend that she had a sweetheart,

that with him she was a-roving.

Una was not highly successful in her make-believe. She could not picture

the imaginary man who walked beside her. She refused to permit him to

resemble Walter Babson, and he refused to resemble anybody else. But she

was throbbingly sure he was there as she entered a drug-store and bought

a "Berline bonbon," a confection guaranteed to increase the chronic

nervous indigestion from which stenographers suffer. Her shadow lover

tried to hold her hand. She snatched it away and blushed. She fancied

that a matron at the next tiny table was watching her silly play,

reflected in the enormous mirror behind the marble soda-counter. The

lover vanished. As she left the drug-store Una was pretending that she

was still pretending, but found it difficult to feel so very

exhilarated.

She permitted herself to go to a motion-picture show. She looked over

all the posters in front of the theater, and a train-wreck, a seaside

love-scene, a detective drama, all invited her.

A man in the seat in front of her in the theater nestled toward his

sweetheart and harshly muttered, "Oh you old honey!" In the red light

from the globe marking an exit she saw his huge red hand, with its

thicket of little golden hairs, creep toward the hand of the girl.

Una longed for a love-scene on the motion-picture screen.

The old, slow familiar pain of congestion in the back of her neck came

back. But she forgot the pain when the love-scene did appear, in a

picture of a lake shore with a hotel porch, the flat sheen of

photographed water, rushing boats, and a young hero with wavy black

hair, who dived for the lady and bore her out when she fell out of a

reasonably safe boat. The actor's wet, white flannels clung tight about

his massive legs; he threw back his head with masculine arrogance, then

kissed the lady. Una was dizzy with that kiss. She was shrinking before

Walter's lips again. She could feel her respectable, typewriter-hardened

fingers stroke the actor's swarthy, virile jaw. She gasped with the

vividness of the feeling. She was shocked at herself; told herself she

was not being "nice"; looked guiltily about; but passionately she called

for the presence of her vague, imaginary lover.

"Oh, my dear, my dear, my dear!" she whispered, with a terrible

cloistered sweetness--whispered to love itself.

Deliberately ignoring the mother who waited at home, she determined to

spend a riotous evening going to a real theater, a real play. That is,

if she could get a fifty-cent seat.

She could not.

"It's been exciting, running away, even if I can't go to the theater,"

Una comforted herself. "I'll go down to Lady Sessions's this evening.

I'll pack mother off to bed. I'll take the Sessionses up some ice-cream,

and we'll have a jolly time.... Mother won't care if I go. Or maybe

she'll come with me"--knowing all the while that her mother would not

come, and decidedly would care if Una deserted her.

However negligible her mother seemed from down-town, she loomed gigantic

as Una approached their flat and assured herself that she was glad to be

returning to the dear one.

The flat was on the fifth floor.

It was a dizzying climb--particularly on this hot afternoon.

§ 6

As Una began to trudge up the flat-sounding slate treads she discovered

that her head was aching as though some one were pinching the top of her

eyeballs. Each time she moved her head the pain came in a perceptible

wave. The hallway reeked with that smell of onions and fried fish which

had arrived with the first tenants. Children were dragging noisy objects

about the halls. As the throb grew sharper during the centuries it took

her to climb the first three flights of stairs, Una realized how hot she

was, how the clammy coolness of the hall was penetrated by stabs of

street heat which entered through the sun-haloed windows at the stair

landings.

Una knocked at the door of her flat with that light, cheery tapping of

her nails, like a fairy tattoo, which usually brought her mother running

to let her in. She was conscious, almost with a physical sensation, of

her mother; wanted to hold her close and, in the ecstasy of that caress,

squeeze the office weariness from her soul. The Little Mother Saint--she

was coming now--she was hurrying--

But the little mother was not hurrying. There was no response to Una's

knock. As Una stooped in the dimness of the hallway to search in her bag

for her latch-key, the pain pulsed through the top of her head again.

She opened the door, and her longing for the embrace of her mother

disappeared in healthy anger.

The living-room was in disorder. Her mother had not touched it all

day--had gone off and left it.

"This is a little too much!" Una said, grimly.

The only signs of life were Mrs. Golden's pack of cards for solitaire,

her worn, brown Morris-chair, and accretions of the cheap magazines with

pretty-girl covers which Mrs. Golden ransacked for love-stories. Mrs.

Golden had been reading all the evening before, and pages of newspapers

were crumpled in her chair, not one of them picked up. The couch, where

Una had slept because it had been too hot for the two of them in a

double bed, was still an eruption of bedclothes--the pillow wadded up,

the sheets dragging out across the unswept floor.... The room

represented discomfort, highly respectable poverty--and cleaning, which

Una had to do before she could rest.

She sat down on the couch and groaned: "To have to come home to this! I

simply can't trust mother. She hasn't done one--single--thing, not one

single thing. And if it were only the first time--! But it's every day,

pretty nearly. She's been asleep all day, and then gone for a walk. Oh

yes, of course! She'll come back and say she'd forgotten this was

Saturday and I'd be home early! Oh, of course!"

From the bedroom came a cough, then another. Una tried to keep her soft

little heart in its temporary state of hardness long enough to have some

effect on household discipline. "Huh!" she grunted. "Got a cold again.

If she'd only stay outdoors a little--"

She stalked to the door of the bedroom. The blind was down, the window

closed, the room stifling and filled with a yellow, unwholesome glimmer.

From the bed her mother's voice, changed from its usual ring to a croak

that was crepuscular as the creepy room, wheezed: "That--you--deary? I

got--summer--cold--so sorry--leave work undone--"

"If you would only keep your windows _open_, my dear mother--"

Una marched to the window, snapped up the blind, banged up the sash, and

left the room.

"I really can't see why!" was all she added. She did not look at her

mother.

She slapped the living-room into order as though the disordered

bedclothes and newspapers were bad children. She put the potatoes on to

boil. She loosened her tight collar and sat down to read the "comic

strips," the "Beauty Hints," and the daily instalment of the

husband-and-wife serial in her evening paper. Una had nibbled at

Shakespeare, Tennyson, Longfellow, and _Vanity Fair_ in her high-school

days, but none of these had satisfied her so deeply as did the serial's

hint of sex and husband. She was absorbed by it. Yet all the while she

was irritably conscious of her mother's cough--hacking, sore-sounding,

throat-catching. Una was certain that this was merely one of the

frequent imaginary ailments of her mother, who was capable of believing

that she had cancer every time she was bitten by a mosquito. But this

incessant crackling made Una jumpily anxious.

She reached these words in the serial: "I cannot forget, Amy, that

whatever I am, my good old mother made me, with her untiring care and

the gentle words she spoke to me when worried and harassed with doubt."

Una threw down the paper, rushed into the bedroom, crouched beside her

mother, crying, "Oh, my mother sweetheart! You're just everything to

me," and kissed her forehead.

The forehead was damp and cold, like a cellar wall. Una sat bolt up in

horror. Her mother's face had a dusky flush, her lips were livid as

clotted blood. Her arms were stiff, hard to the touch. Her breathing,

rapid and agitated, like a frightened panting, was interrupted just then

by a cough like the rattling of stiff, heavy paper, which left on her

purple lips a little colorless liquid.

"Mother! Mother! My little mother--you're sick, you're really _sick_,

and I didn't know and I spoke so harshly. Oh, what _is_ it, what is it,

mother dear?"

"Bad--cold," Mrs. Golden whispered. "I started coughing last night--I

closed the door--you didn't hear me; you were in the other room--"

Another cough wheezed dismally, shook her, gurgled in her yellow

deep-lined neck. "C-could I have--window closed now?"

"No. I'm going to be your nurse. Just an awfully cranky old nurse, and

so scientific. And you must have fresh air." Her voice broke. "Oh, and

me sleeping away from you! I'll never do it again. I don't know what I

_would_ do if anything happened to you.... Do you feel any headache,

dear?"

"No--not--not so much as-- Side pains me--here."

Mrs. Golden's words labored like a steamer in heavy seas; the throbbing

of her heart shook them like the throb of the engines. She put her hand

to her right side, shakily, with effort. It lay there, yellow against

the white muslin of her nightgown, then fell heavily to the bed, like a

dead thing. Una trembled with fear as her mother continued, "My

pulse--it's so fast--so hard breathing--side pain."

"I'll put on an ice compress and then I'll go and get a doctor."

Mrs. Golden tried to sit up. "Oh no, no, no! Not a doctor! Not a

doctor!" she croaked. "Doctor Smyth will be busy."

"Well, I'll have him come when he's through."

"Oh no, no, can't afford--"

"Why--"

"And--they scare you so--he'd pretend I had pneumonia, like Sam's

sister--he'd frighten me so--I just have a summer cold. I--I'll be all

right to-morrow, deary. Oh no, no, _please_ don't, please don't get a

doctor. Can't afford it--can't--"

Pneumonia! At the word, which brought the sterile bitterness of winter

into this fetid August room, Una was in a rigor of fear, yet galvanized

with belief in her mother's bravery. "My brave, brave little mother!"

she thought.

Not till Una had promised that she would not summon the doctor was her

mother quieted, though Una made the promise with reservations. She

relieved the pain in her mother's side with ice compresses--the ice

chipped from the pitiful little cake in their tiny ice-box. She

freshened pillows, she smoothed sheets; she made hot broth and bathed

her mother's shoulders with tepid water and rubbed her temples with

menthol. But the fever increased, and at times Mrs. Golden broke through

her shallow slumber with meaningless sentences, like the beginning of

delirium.

At midnight she was panting more and more rapidly--three times as fast

as normal breathing. She was sunk in a stupor. And Una, brooding by the

bed, a crouched figure of mute tragedy in the low light, grew more and

more apprehensive as her mother seemed to be borne away from her. Una

started up. She would risk her mother's displeasure and bring the

doctor. Just then, even Doctor Smyth of the neighborhood practice and

obstetrical habits seemed a miracle-worker.

She had to go four blocks to the nearest drug-store that would be open

at this time of night, and there telephone the doctor.

She was aware that it was raining, for the fire-escape outside shone wet

in the light from a window across the narrow court. She discovered she

had left mackintosh and umbrella at the office. Stopping only to set out

a clean towel, a spoon, and a glass on the chair by the bed, Una put on

the old sweater which she secretly wore under her cheap thin jacket in

winter. She lumbered wearily down-stairs. She prayed confusedly that God

would give her back her headache and in reward make her mother well.

She was down-stairs at the heavy, grilled door. Rain was pouring. A

light six stories up in the apartment-house across the street seemed

infinitely distant and lonely, curtained from her by the rain. Water

splashed in the street and gurgled in the gutters. It did not belong to

the city as it would have belonged to brown woods or prairie. It was

violent here, shocking and terrible. It took distinct effort for Una to

wade out into it.

The modern city! Subway, asphalt, a wireless message winging overhead,

and Una Golden, an office-woman in eye-glasses. Yet sickness and rain

and night were abroad; and it was a clumsily wrapped peasant woman,

bent-shouldered and heavily breathing, who trudged unprotected through

the dark side-streets as though she were creeping along moorland paths.

Her thought was dulled to everything but physical discomfort and the

illness which menaced the beloved. Woman's eternal agony for the sick of

her family had transformed the trim smoothness of the office-woman's

face into wrinkles that were tragic and ruggedly beautiful.

§ 7

Again Una climbed the endless stairs to her flat. She unconsciously

counted the beat of the weary, regular rhythm which her feet made on the

slate treads and the landings--one, two, three, four, five, six, seven,

landing, turn and--one, two, three, four, five, six, seven--over and

over. At the foot of the last flight she suddenly believed that her

mother needed her this instant. She broke the regular thumping rhythm of

her climb, dashed up, cried out at the seconds wasted in unlocking the

door. She tiptoed into the bedroom--and found her mother just as she had

left her. In Una's low groan of gladness there was all the world's

self-sacrifice, all the fidelity to a cause or to a love. But as she sat

unmoving she came to feel that her mother was not there; her being was

not in this wreck upon the bed.

In an hour the doctor soothed his way into the flat. He "was afraid

there might be just a little touch of pneumonia." With breezy

fatherliness which inspirited Una, he spoke of the possible presence of

pneumococcus, of doing magic things with Romer's serum, of trusting in

God, of the rain, of cold baths and digitalin. He patted Una's head and

cheerily promised to return at dawn. He yawned and smiled at himself. He

looked as roundly, fuzzily sleepy as a bunny rabbit, but in the quiet,

forlorn room of night and illness he radiated trust in himself. Una said

to herself, "He certainly must know what he is talking about."

She was sure that the danger was over. She did not go to bed, however.

She sat stiffly in the bedroom and planned amusements for her mother.

She would work harder, earn more money. They would move to a cottage in

the suburbs, where they would have chickens and roses and a kitten, and

her mother would find neighborly people again.

Five days after, late on a bright, cool afternoon, when all the flats

about them were thinking of dinner, her mother died.

§ 8

There was a certain madness in Una's grief. Her agony was a big, simple,

uncontrollable emotion, like the fanaticism of a crusader--alarming, it

was, not to be reckoned with, and beautiful as a storm. Yet it was no

more morbid than the little fits of rage with which a school-teacher

relieves her cramped spirit. For the first time she had the excuse to

exercise her full power of emotion.

Una evoked an image of her mother as one who had been altogether good,

understanding, clever, and unfortunate. She regretted every moment she

had spent away from her--remembered with scorn that she had planned to

go to the theater the preceding Saturday, instead of sanctifying the

time in the Nirvana of the beloved's presence; repented with writhing

agony having spoken harshly about neglected household duties.

She even contrived to find it a virtue in her mother that she had so

often forgotten the daily tasks--her mind had been too fine for such

things.... Una retraced their life. But she remembered everything only

as one remembers under the sway of music.

"If I could just have another hour, just one hour with her, and feel her

hands on my eyes again--"

On the night before the funeral she refused to let even Mrs. Sessions

stay with her. She did not want to share her mother's shadowy presence

with any one.

She lay on the floor beside the bed where her mother was stately in

death. It was her last chance to talk to her:

"Mother ... Mother ... Don't you hear me? It's Una calling. Can't you

answer me this one last time? Oh, mother, think, mother dear, I can't

ever hear your voice again if you don't speak to me now.... Don't you

remember how we went home to Panama, our last vacation? Don't you

remember how happy we were down at the lake? Little mother, you haven't

forgotten, have you? Even if you don't answer, you know I'm watching by

you, don't you? See, I'm kissing your hand. Oh, you did want me to

sleep near you again, this last night-- Oh, my God! oh, my God! the last

night I shall ever spend with her, the very last, last night."

All night long the thin voice came from the little white-clad figure so

insignificant in the dimness, now lying motionless on the comforter she

had spread beside the bed, and talking in a tone of ordinary

conversation that was uncanny in this room of invisible whisperers; now

leaping up to kiss the dead hand in a panic, lest it should already be

gone.

The funeral filled the house with intruders. The drive to the cemetery

was irritating. She wanted to leap out of the carriage. At first she

concentrated on the cushion beside her till she thought of nothing in

the world but the faded bottle-green upholstery, and a ridiculous drift

of dust in the tufting. But some one was talking to her. (It was awkward

Mr. Sessions, for shrewd Mrs. Sessions had the genius to keep still.) He

kept stammering the most absurd platitudes about how happy her mother

must be in a heaven regarding which he did not seem to have very recent

or definite knowledge. She was annoyed, not comforted. She wanted to

break away, to find her mother's presence again in that sacred place

where she had so recently lived and spoken.

Yet, when Una returned to the flat, something was gone. She tried to

concentrate on thought about immortality. She found that she had

absolutely no facts upon which to base her thought. The hundreds of

good, sound, orthodox sermons she had heard gave her nothing but vague

pictures of an eternal church supper somewhere in the clouds--nothing,

blankly and terribly nothing, that answered her bewildered wonder as to

what had become of the spirit which had been there and now was gone.

In the midst of her mingling of longing and doubt she realized that she

was hungry, and she rather regretted having refused Mrs. Sessions's

invitation to dinner. She moved slowly about the kitchen.

The rheumatic old canary hobbled along the floor of his cage and tried

to sing. At that Una wept, "She never will hear poor Dickie sing again."

Instantly she remembered--as clearly as though she were actually

listening to the voice and words--that her mother had burst out, "Drat

that bird, it does seem as if every time I try to take a nap he just

tries to wake me up." Una laughed grimly. Hastily she reproved herself,

"Oh, but mother didn't mean--"

But in memory of that healthily vexed voice, it seemed less wicked to

take notice of food, and after a reasonable dinner she put on her kimono

and bedroom slippers, carefully arranged the pillows on the couch, and

lay among them, meditating on her future.

For half an hour she was afire with an eager thought: "Why can't I

really make a success of business, now that I can entirely devote myself

to it? There's women--in real estate, and lawyers and magazine

editors--some of them make ten thousand a year."

So Una Golden ceased to live a small-town life in New York; so she

became a genuine part of the world of offices; took thought and tried to

conquer this new way of city-dwelling.

"Maybe I can find out if there's anything in life--now--besides working

for T. W. till I'm scrapped like an old machine," she pondered. "How I

hate letters about two-family houses in Flatbush!"

She dug her knuckles into her forehead in the effort to visualize the

problem of the hopeless women in industry.

She was an Average Young Woman on a Job; she thought in terms of money

and offices; yet she was one with all the men and women, young and old,

who were creating a new age. She was nothing in herself, yet as the

molecule of water belongs to the ocean, so Una Golden humbly belonged to

the leaven who, however confusedly, were beginning to demand, "Why,

since we have machinery, science, courage, need we go on tolerating war

and poverty and caste and uncouthness, and all that sheer clumsiness?"

Part II

THE OFFICE

CHAPTER IX

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.

§ 2

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.

§ 3

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.

§ 4

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!"

§ 5

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.

§ 6

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.

§ 7

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 café 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 débâcle.

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 X

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."

§ 2

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.

§ 3

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.

§ 4

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.

§ 5

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 XI

"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 negligées 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 negligée 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.

§ 2

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 café. 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 XII

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.

§ 2

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.

§ 3

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.

§ 4

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 XIII

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 Ætna 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 cafés 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.

§ 2

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.

§ 3

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

débutante'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 Ætna Automobile

Varnish Company was a success. But she fluttered up to her feet, became

the wilful débutante 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.

§ 4

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.

§ 5

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 débutante 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.

§ 6

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 régime_; 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!"

§ 7

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 negligée 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 XIV

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 _clichés_ 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?

§ 2

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.

§ 3

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.

§ 4

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 XV

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 _à 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?"

§ 2

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 Café, 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.

§ 3

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."

Part III

MAN AND WOMAN