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.