“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.