§ 5
Una was, she hoped, “trying to think about things.” Naturally, one who used that boarding-house phrase could not think transformingly.
She wasn’t illuminative about Romain Rolland or Rodin or village welfare. She was still trying to decide whether the suffrage movement was ladylike and whether Dickens or Thackeray was the better novelist. But she really was trying to decide.
She compiled little lists of books to read, “movements” to investigate. She made a somewhat incoherent written statement of what she was trying to do, and this she kept in her top bureau drawer, among the ribbons, collars, imitation pearl necklaces, handkerchiefs, letters from Walter, and photographs of Panama and her mother.
She took it out sometimes, and relieved the day’s accumulated suffering by adding such notes as:
“Be nice & human w. employes if ever have any of own; office wretched hole anyway bec. of econ. system; W. used to say, why make worse by being cranky.”
Or:
“Study music, it brings country and W. and poetry and everything; take piano les. when get time.”
So Una tramped, weary always at dusk, but always recreated at dawn, through one of those periods of timeless, unmarked months, when all drama seems past and unreal and apparently nothing will ever happen again.
Then, in one week, everything became startling—she found melodrama and a place of friendship.