§ 5
Tedious were the negotiations between Una and Mr. Sidney and his partner. They wanted her to make their hotels—and yet they had never heard of anything so nihilistic as actually having hotel “offices” without “desks.” They wanted her, and yet they “didn’t quite know about adding any more overhead at this stage of the game.”
Meantime Una sold lots and studied the economical buying of hotel supplies. She was always willing to go with Mr. Sidney and his partner to lunch—but they were brief lunches. She was busy, she said, and she had no time to “drop in at their office.” When Mr. Sidney once tried to hold her hand (not seriously, but with his methodical system of never failing to look into any possibilities), she said, sharply, “Don’t try that—let’s save a lot of time by understanding that I’m what you would call ‘straight.’” He apologized and assured her that he had known she was a “high-class genuwine lady all the time.”
The very roughness which, in Mr. Schwirtz, had abraised her, interested her in Mr. Sidney. She knew better now how to control human beings. She was fascinated by a comparison of her four average citizens—four men not vastly varied as seen in a street-car, yet utterly different to one working with them: Schwirtz, the lumbering; Troy Wilkins, the roaring; Truax, the politely whining; and Bob Sidney, the hesitating.
The negotiations seemed to arrive nowhere.
Then, unexpectedly, Bob Sidney telephoned to her at her flat one evening: “Partner and I have just decided to take you on, if you’ll come at thirty-eight hundred a year.”
Una hadn’t even thought of the salary. She would gladly have gone to her new creative position at the three thousand two hundred she was then receiving. But she showed her new training and demanded:
“Four thousand two hundred.”
“Well, split the difference and call it four thousand for the first year.”
“All right.”
Una stood in the center of the room. She had “succeeded on her job.” Then she knew that she wanted some one with whom to share the good news.
She sat down and thought of her almost-forgotten plan to adopt a child.