§ 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.