§ 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.