She plunged in again:
“Now the point of all this is that I want to be the general manager of certain departments of the Line—catering, service, decoration, and so on. I’ll keep out of the financial end and we’ll work out the buying together. You know it’s women who make the homes for people at home, and why not the homes for people traveling?... I’m woman sales-manager for Truax & Fein—sell direct, and six women under me. I’ll show you my record of sales. I’ve been secretary to an architect, and studied architecture a little. And plenty other jobs. Now you take these suggestions of mine to your office and study’em over with your partner and we’ll talk about the job for me by and by.”
She left him as quickly as she could, got back to her office, and in a shaking spasm of weeping relapsed into the old, timorous Una.
§ 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: