Ross called her in, on a winter afternoon, told her that he had orders from the owner to “reduce the force,” because of a “change of policy,” and that, though he was sorry, he would have to “let her go because she was one of the most recent additions.” He assured her royally that he had been pleased by her work; that he would be glad to give her “the best kind of a recommend—and if the situation loosens up again, I’d be tickled to death to have you drop in and see me. Just between us, I think the owner will regret this tight-wad policy.”
But Mr. S. Herbert Ross continued to go out to lunch with the owner, and Una went through all the agony of not being wanted even in the prison she hated. No matter what the reason, being discharged is the final insult in an office, and it made her timid as she began wildly to seek a new job.
CHAPTER VIII
IN novels and plays architects usually are delicate young men who wear silky Vandyke beards, play the piano, and do a good deal with pictures and rugs. They leap with desire to erect charming cottages for the poor, and to win prize contests for the Jackson County Courthouse. They always have good taste; they are perfectly mad about simplicity and gracefulness. But from the number of flat-faced houses and three-toned wooden churches still being erected, it may be deduced that somewhere there are architects who are not enervated by too much good taste.
Mr. Troy Wilkins, architect, with an office in the Septimus Building, was a commuter. He wore a derby and a clipped mustache, and took interest in cameras, player-pianos, phonographs, small motor-cars, speedometers, tires, patent nicotineless pipes, jolly tobacco for jimmy-pipes, tennis-rackets, correspondence courses, safety-razors, optimism, Theodore Roosevelt, pocket flashlights, rubber heels, and all other well-advertised wares. He was a conservative Republican and a Congregationalist, and on his desk he kept three silver-framed photographs—one of his wife and two children, one of his dog Rover, and one of his architectural masterpiece, the mansion of Peter B. Reardon, the copper king of Montana.
Mr. Troy Wilkins lamented the passing of the solid and expensive stone residences of the nineties, but he kept “up to date,” and he had added ideals about half-timbered villas, doorway settles, garages, and sleeping-porches to his repertoire. He didn’t, however, as he often said, “believe in bungalows any more than he believed in these labor unions.”
§ 2
Una Golden had been the chief of Mr. Troy Wilkins’s two stenographers for seven months now—midsummer of 1907, when she was twenty-six. She had climbed to thirteen dollars a week. The few hundred dollars which she had received from Captain Golden’s insurance were gone, and her mother and she had to make a science of saving—economize on milk, on bread, on laundry, on tooth-paste. But that didn’t really matter, because Una never went out except for walks and moving-picture shows, with her mother. She had no need, no want of clothes to impress suitors.... She had four worn letters from Walter Babson which she re-read every week or two; she had her mother and, always, her job.