“Very well. Will you call for me here—Truax & Fein, Zodiac Building?”
Una arose at six-thirty next morning, to dress the part of the great business woman, and before she went to the office she had her hair waved.
Mr. Bob Sidney called for her. He was a simple, energetic soul, with a derby on the back of his head, cheerful, clean-shaven, large-chinned, hoarse-voiced, rapidly revolving a chewed cigar. She, the commonplace, was highly evolved in comparison with Mr. Sidney, and there was no nervousness in her as she marched out in a twenty-dollar hat and casually said, “Let’s go to the Waldorf—it’s convenient and not at all bad.”
On the way over Mr. Sidney fairly massaged his head with his agitated derby—cocked it over one eye and pushed it back to the crown of his head—in his efforts to find out what and why was Mrs. Una Schwirtz. He kept appraising her. It was obvious that he was trying to decide whether this mysterious telephone correspondent was an available widow who had heard of his charms. He finally stumbled over the grating beside the Waldorf and bumped into the carriage-starter, and dropped his dead cigar. But all the while Una steadily kept the conversation to the vernal beauties of Pennsylvania.
Thanks to rice powder and the pride of a new hat, she looked cool and adequate. But she was thinking all the time: “I never could keep up this Beatrice-Joline pose with Mr. Fein or Mr. Ross. Poor Una, with them she’d just have to blurt out that she wanted a job!”
She sailed up to a corner table by a window. The waiter gave the menu to Mr. Sidney, but she held out her hand for it. “This is my lunch. I’m a business woman, not just a woman,” she said to Mr. Sidney; and she rapidly ordered a lunch which was shockingly imitative of one which Mr. Fein had once ordered for her.
“Prett’ hot day for April,” said Mr. Sidney.
“Yes.... Is the White Line going well?”
“Yump. Doing a land-office business.”
“You’re having trouble with your day clerk at Brockenfelt, I see.”