Sex meant nothing between them now. She did not believe that she would ever be in love again, in any phase, noble or crude. While she aspired and worked she lived like a nun in a cell. And now that she had something to do, she could be sorry for him. She made the best possible dinners for him on their gas-range. She realized—sometimes, not often, for she was not a contemplative seer, but a battered woman—that their marriage had been as unfair to him as it was to her. In small-town boy-gang talks behind barns, in clerkly confidences as a young man, in the chatter of smoking-cars and provincial hotel offices, he had been trained to know only two kinds of women, both very complaisant to smart live-wires: The bouncing lassies who laughed and kissed and would share with a man his pleasures, such as poker and cocktails, and rapid motoring to no place in particular; and the meek, attentive, “refined” kind, the wives and mothers who cared for a man and admired him and believed whatever he told them about his business.
Una was of neither sort for him, though for Walter Babson she might have been quite of the latter kind. Mr. Schwirtz could not understand her, and she was as sorry for him as was compatible with a decided desire to divorce him and wash off the stain of his damp, pulpy fingers with the water of life.
But she stayed home, and washed and cooked, and earned money for him—till he lost his retail-store position by getting drunk and being haughty to a customer.
Then the chrysalis burst and Una was free again. Free to labor, to endeavor—to die, perhaps, but to die clean. To quest and meet whatever surprises life might hold.
§ 2
She couldn’t go back to Troy Wilkins’s, nor to Mr. S. Herbert Ross and the little Pemberton stenographers who had enviously seen her go off to be married. But she made a real business of looking for a job. While Mr. Schwirtz stayed home and slept and got mental bed-sores and drank himself to death—rather too slowly—on another fifty dollars which he had borrowed after a Verdun campaign, Una was joyous to be out early, looking over advertisements, visiting typewriter companies’ employment agencies.
She was slow in getting work because she wanted twenty dollars a week. She knew that any firm taking her at this wage would respect her far more than if she was an easy purchase.
Work was slow to come, and she, who had always been so securely above the rank of paupers who submit to the dreadful surgery of charity, became afraid. She went at last to Mamie Magen.
Mamie was now the executive secretary of the Hebrew Young Women’s Professional Union. She seemed to be a personage. In her office she had a secretary who spoke of her with adoring awe, and when Una said that she was a personal friend of Miss Magen the secretary cried: “Oh, then perhaps you’d like to go to her apartment, at —— Washington Place. She’s almost always home for tea at five.”
The small, tired-looking Una, a business woman again, in her old tailor-made and a new, small hat, walked longingly toward Washington Place and tea.