THE JOB
AN AMERICAN NOVEL
BY
SINCLAIR LEWIS
AUTHOR OF
MAIN STREET,
BABBITT, Etc.

GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS   NEW YORK

Made in the United States of America
The Job
Copyright, 1917, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
Published February, 1917
B-R

to
My Wife
WHO HAS MADE “THE JOB”
POSSIBLE AND LIFE ITSELF
QUITE BEAUTIFULLY
IMPROBABLE

CONTENTS.

THE CITY

THE OFFICE

MAN AND WOMAN

Part I
THE CITY

CHAPTER I

CAPTAIN LEW GOLDEN would have saved any foreign observer a great deal of trouble in studying America. He was an almost perfect type of the petty small-town middle-class lawyer. He lived in Panama, Pennsylvania. He had never been “captain” of anything except the Crescent Volunteer Fire Company, but he owned the title because he collected rents, wrote insurance, and meddled with lawsuits.

He carried a quite visible mustache-comb and wore a collar, but no tie. On warm days he appeared on the street in his shirt-sleeves, and discussed the comparative temperatures of the past thirty years with Doctor Smith and the Mansion House ’bus-driver. He never used the word “beauty” except in reference to a setter dog—beauty of words or music, of faith or rebellion, did not exist for him. He rather fancied large, ambitious, banal, red-and-gold sunsets, but he merely glanced at them as he straggled home, and remarked that they were “nice.” He believed that all Parisians, artists, millionaires, and socialists were immoral. His entire system of theology was comprised in the Bible, which he never read, and the Methodist Church, which he rarely attended; and he desired no system of economics beyond the current platform of the Republican party. He was aimlessly industrious, crotchety but kind, and almost quixotically honest.

He believed that “Panama, Pennsylvania, was good enough for anybody.”

This last opinion was not shared by his wife, nor by his daughter Una.

Mrs. Golden was one of the women who aspire just enough to be vaguely discontented; not enough to make them toil at the acquisition of understanding and knowledge. She had floated into a comfortable semi-belief in a semi-Christian Science, and she read novels with a conviction that she would have been a romantic person “if she hadn’t married Mr. Golden—not but what he’s a fine man and very bright and all, but he hasn’t got much imagination or any, well, romance!”

She wrote poetry about spring and neighborhood births, and Captain Golden admired it so actively that he read it aloud to callers. She attended all the meetings of the Panama Study Club, and desired to learn French, though she never went beyond borrowing a French grammar from the Episcopalian rector and learning one conjugation. But in the pioneer suffrage movement she took no part—she didn’t “think it was quite ladylike.” ... She was a poor cook, and her house always smelled stuffy, but she liked to have flowers about. She was pretty of face, frail of body, genuinely gracious of manner. She really did like people, liked to give cookies to the neighborhood boys, and—if you weren’t impatient with her slackness—you found her a wistful and touching figure in her slight youthfulness and in the ambition to be a romantic personage, a Marie Antoinette or a Mrs. Grover Cleveland, which ambition she still retained at fifty-five.

She was, in appearance, the ideal wife and mother—sympathetic, forgiving, bright-lipped as a May morning. She never demanded; she merely suggested her desires, and, if they were refused, let her lips droop in a manner which only a brute could withstand.

She plaintively admired her efficient daughter Una.

Una Golden was a “good little woman”—not pretty, not noisy, not particularly articulate, but instinctively on the inside of things; naturally able to size up people and affairs. She had common sense and unkindled passion. She was a matter-of-fact idealist, with a healthy woman’s simple longing for love and life. At twenty-four Una had half a dozen times fancied herself in love. She had been embraced at a dance, and felt the stirring of a desire for surrender. But always a native shrewdness had kept her from agonizing over these affairs.

She was not—and will not be—a misunderstood genius, an undeveloped artist, an embryonic leader in feminism, nor an ugly duckling who would put on a Georgette hat and captivate the theatrical world. She was an untrained, ambitious, thoroughly commonplace, small-town girl. But she was a natural executive and she secretly controlled the Golden household; kept Captain Golden from eating with his knife, and her mother from becoming drugged with too much reading of poppy-flavored novels.

She wanted to learn, learn anything. But the Goldens were too respectable to permit her to have a job, and too poor to permit her to go to college. From the age of seventeen, when she had graduated from the high school—in white ribbons and heavy new boots and tight new organdy—to twenty-three, she had kept house and gone to gossip-parties and unmethodically read books from the town library—Walter Scott, Richard Le Gallienne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mrs. Humphry Ward, How to Know the Birds, My Year in the Holy Land, Home Needlework, Sartor Resartus, and Ships that Pass in the Night. Her residue of knowledge from reading them was a disbelief in Panama, Pennsylvania.

She was likely never to be anything more amazing than a mother and wife, who would entertain the Honiton Embroidery Circle twice a year.

Yet, potentially, Una Golden was as glowing as any princess of balladry. She was waiting for the fairy prince, though he seemed likely to be nothing more decorative than a salesman in a brown derby. She was fluid; indeterminate as a moving cloud.

Although Una Golden had neither piquant prettiness nor grave handsomeness, her soft littleness made people call her “Puss,” and want to cuddle her as a child cuddles a kitten. If you noted Una at all, when you met her, you first noted her gentle face, her fine-textured hair of faded gold, and her rimless eye-glasses with a gold chain over her ear. These glasses made a business-like center to her face; you felt that without them she would have been too childish. Her mouth was as kind as her spirited eyes, but it drooped. Her body was so femininely soft that you regarded her as rather plump. But for all her curving hips, and the thick ankles which she considered “common,” she was rather anemic. Her cheeks were round, not rosy, but clear and soft; her lips a pale pink. Her chin was plucky and undimpled; it was usually spotted with one or two unimportant eruptions, which she kept so well covered with powder that they were never noticeable. No one ever thought of them except Una herself, to whom they were tragic blemishes which she timorously examined in the mirror every time she went to wash her hands. She knew that they were the result of the indigestible Golden family meals; she tried to take comfort by noticing their prevalence among other girls; but they kept startling her anew; she would secretly touch them with a worried forefinger, and wonder whether men were able to see anything else in her face.

You remembered her best as she hurried through the street in her tan mackintosh with its yellow velveteen collar turned high up, and one of those modest round hats to which she was addicted. For then you were aware only of the pale-gold hair fluffing round her school-mistress eye-glasses, her gentle air of respectability, and her undistinguished littleness.

She trusted in the village ideal of virginal vacuousness as the type of beauty which most captivated men, though every year she was more shrewdly doubtful of the divine superiority of these men. That a woman’s business in life was to remain respectable and to secure a man, and consequent security, was her unmeditated faith—till, in 1905, when Una was twenty-four years old, her father died.

§ 2

Captain Golden left to wife and daughter a good name, a number of debts, and eleven hundred dollars in lodge insurance. The funeral was scarcely over before neighbors—the furniture man, the grocer, the polite old homeopathic doctor—began to come in with bland sympathy and large bills. When the debts were all cleared away the Goldens had only six hundred dollars and no income beyond the good name. All right-minded persons agree that a good name is precious beyond rubies, but Una would have preferred less honor and more rubies.

She was so engaged in comforting her mother that she scarcely grieved for her father. She took charge of everything—money, house, bills.

Mrs. Golden had been overwhelmed by a realization that, however slack and shallow Captain Golden had been, he had adored her and encouraged her in her gentility, her pawing at culture. With an emerging sincerity, Mrs. Golden mourned him, now, missed his gossipy presence—and at the same time she was alive to the distinction it added to her slim gracefulness to wear black and look wan. She sobbed on Una’s shoulder; she said that she was lonely; and Una sturdily comforted her and looked for work.

One of the most familiar human combinations in the world is that of unemployed daughter and widowed mother. A thousand times you have seen the jobless daughter devoting all of her curiosity, all of her youth, to a widowed mother of small pleasantries, a small income, and a shabby security. Thirty comes, and thirty-five. The daughter ages steadily. At forty she is as old as her unwithering mother. Sweet she is, and pathetically hopeful of being a pianist or a nurse; never quite reconciled to spinsterhood, though she often laughs about it; often, by her insistence that she is an “old maid,” she makes the thought of her barren age embarrassing to others. The mother is sweet, too, and “wants to keep in touch with her daughter’s interests,” only, her daughter has no interests. Had the daughter revolted at eighteen, had she stubbornly insisted that mother either accompany her to parties or be content to stay alone, had she acquired “interests,” she might have meant something in the new generation; but the time for revolt passes, however much the daughter may long to seem young among younger women. The mother is usually unconscious of her selfishness; she would be unspeakably horrified if some brutal soul told her that she was a vampire. Chance, chance and waste, rule them both, and the world passes by while the mother has her games of cards with daughter, and deems herself unselfish because now and then she lets daughter join a party (only to hasten back to mother), and even “wonders why daughter doesn’t take an interest in girls her own age.” That ugly couple on the porch of the apple-sauce and wash-pitcher boarding-house—the mother a mute, dwarfish punchinello, and the daughter a drab woman of forty with a mole, a wart, a silence. That charming mother of white hair and real lace with the well-groomed daughter. That comfortable mother at home and daughter in an office, but with no suitors, no ambition beyond the one at home. They are all examples of the mother-and-daughter phenomenon, that most touching, most destructive example of selfless unselfishness, which robs all the generations to come, because mother has never been trained to endure the long, long thoughts of solitude; because she sees nothing by herself, and within herself hears no diverting voice....

There were many such mothers and daughters in Panama. If they were wealthy, daughter collected rents and saw lawyers and belonged to a club and tried to keep youthful at parties. If middle-class, daughter taught school, almost invariably. If poor, mother did the washing and daughter collected it. So it was marked down for Una that she should be a teacher.

Not that she wanted to be a teacher! After graduating from high school, she had spent two miserable terms of teaching in the small white district school, four miles out on the Bethlehem Road. She hated the drive out and back, the airless room and the foul outbuildings, the shy, stupid, staring children, the jolly little arithmetical problems about wall-paper, piles of lumber, the amount of time that notoriously inefficient workmen will take to do “a certain piece of work.” Una was honest enough to know that she was not an honest teacher, that she neither loved masses of other people’s children nor had any ideals of developing the new generation. But she had to make money. Of course she would teach!

When she talked over affairs with her tearful mother, Mrs. Golden always ended by suggesting, “I wonder if perhaps you couldn’t go back to school-teaching again. Everybody said you were so successful. And maybe I could get some needlework to do. I do want to help so much.”

Mrs. Golden did, apparently, really want to help. But she never suggested anything besides teaching, and she went on recklessly investing in the nicest mourning. Meantime Una tried to find other work in Panama.

Seen from a balloon, Panama is merely a mole on the long hill-slopes. But to Una its few straggly streets were a whole cosmos. She knew somebody in every single house. She knew just where the succotash, the cake-boxes, the clothes-lines, were kept in each of the grocery-stores, and on market Saturdays she could wait on herself. She summed up the whole town and its possibilities; and she wondered what opportunities the world out beyond Panama had for her. She recalled two trips to Philadelphia and one to Harrisburg. She made out a list of openings with such methodical exactness as she devoted to keeping the dwindling lodge insurance from disappearing altogether. Hers was no poetic outreach like that of the young genius who wants to be off for Bohemia. It was a question of earning money in the least tedious way. Una was facing the feminist problem, without knowing what the word “feminist” meant.

This was her list of fair fields of fruitful labor:

She could—and probably would—teach in some hen-coop of pedagogy.

She could marry, but no one seemed to want her, except old Henry Carson, the widower, with catarrh and three children, who called on her and her mother once in two weeks, and would propose whenever she encouraged him to. This she knew scientifically. She had only to sit beside him on the sofa, let her hand drop down beside his. But she positively and ungratefully didn’t want to marry Henry and listen to his hawking and his grumbling for the rest of her life. Sooner or later one of The Boys might propose. But in a small town it was all a gamble. There weren’t so very many desirable young men—most of the energetic ones went off to Philadelphia and New York. True that Jennie McTevish had been married at thirty-one, when everybody had thought she was hopelessly an old maid. Yet here was Birdie Mayberry unmarried at thirty-four, no one could ever understand why, for she had been the prettiest and jolliest girl in town. Una crossed blessed matrimony off the list as a commercial prospect.

She could go off and study music, law, medicine, elocution, or any of that amazing hodge-podge of pursuits which are permitted to small-town women. But she really couldn’t afford to do any of these; and, besides, she had no talent for music of a higher grade than Sousa and Victor Herbert; she was afraid of lawyers; blood made her sick; and her voice was too quiet for the noble art of elocution as practised by several satin-waisted, semi-artistic ladies who “gave readings” of Enoch Arden and Evangeline before the Panama Study Circle and the Panama Annual Chautauqua.

She could have a job selling dry-goods behind the counter in the Hub Store, but that meant loss of caste.

She could teach dancing—but she couldn’t dance particularly well. And that was all that she could do.

She had tried to find work as office-woman for Dr. Mayberry, the dentist; in the office of the Panama Wood-Turning Company; in the post-office; as lofty enthroned cashier for the Hub Store; painting place-cards and making “fancy-work” for the Art Needlework Exchange.

The job behind the counter in the Hub Store was the only one offered her.

“If I were only a boy,” sighed Una, “I could go to work in the hardware-store or on the railroad or anywhere, and not lose respectability. Oh, I hate being a woman.”

§ 3

Una had been trying to persuade her father’s old-time rival, Squire Updegraff, the real-estate and insurance man, that her experience with Captain Golden would make her a perfect treasure in the office. Squire Updegraff had leaped up at her entrance, and blared, “Well, well, and how is the little girl making it?” He had set out a chair for her and held her hand. But he knew that her only experience with her father’s affairs had been an effort to balance Captain Golden’s account-books, which were works of genius in so far as they were composed according to the inspirational method. So there was nothing very serious in their elaborate discussion of giving Una a job.

It was her last hope in Panama. She went disconsolately down the short street, between the two-story buildings and the rows of hitched lumber-wagons. Nellie Page, the town belle, tripping by in canvas sneakers and a large red hair-ribbon, shouted at her, and Charlie Martindale, of the First National Bank, nodded to her, but these exquisites were too young for her; they danced too well and laughed too easily. The person who stopped her for a long curbstone conference about the weather, while most of the town observed and gossiped, was the fateful Henry Carson. The village sun was unusually blank and hard on Henry’s bald spot to-day. Heavens! she cried to herself, in almost hysterical protest, would she have to marry Henry?

Miss Mattie Pugh drove by, returning from district school. Miss Mattie had taught at Clark’s Crossing for seventeen years, had grown meek and meager and hopeless. Heavens! thought Una, would she have to be shut into the fetid barn of a small school unless she married Henry?

“I won’t be genteel! I’ll work in The Hub or any place first!” Una declared. While she trudged home—a pleasant, inconspicuous, fluffy-haired young woman, undramatic as a field daisy—a cataract of protest poured through her. All the rest of her life she would have to meet that doddering old Mr. Mosely, who was unavoidably bearing down on her now, and be held by him in long, meaningless talks. And there was nothing amusing to do! She was so frightfully bored. She suddenly hated the town, hated every evening she would have to spend there, reading newspapers and playing cards with her mother, and dreading a call from Mr. Henry Carson.

She wanted—wanted some one to love, to talk with. Why had she discouraged the beautiful Charlie Martindale, the time he had tried to kiss her at a dance? Charlie was fatuous, but he was young, and she wanted, yes, yes! that was it, she wanted youth, she who was herself so young. And she would grow old here unless some one, one of these godlike young men, condescended to recognize her. Grow old among these streets like piles of lumber.

She charged into the small, white, ambling Golden house, with its peculiar smell of stale lamb gravy, and on the old broken couch—where her father had snored all through every bright Sunday afternoon—she sobbed feebly.

She raised her head to consider a noise overhead—the faint, domestic thunder of a sewing-machine shaking the walls with its rhythm. The machine stopped. She heard the noise of scissors dropped on the floor—the most stuffily domestic sound in the world. The airless house was crushing her. She sprang up—and then she sat down again. There was no place to which she could flee. Henry Carson and the district school were menacing her. And meantime she had to find out what her mother was sewing—whether she had again been wasting money in buying mourning.

“Poor, poor little mother, working away happy up there, and I’ve got to go and scold you,” Una agonized. “Oh, I want to earn money, I want to earn real money for you.”

She saw a quadrangle of white on the table, behind a book. She pounced on it. It was a letter from Mrs. Sessions, and Una scratched it open excitedly.

Mr. and Mrs. Albert Sessions, of Panama, had gone to New York. Mr. Sessions was in machinery. They liked New York. They lived in a flat and went to theaters. Mrs. Sessions was a pillowy soul whom Una trusted.

“Why don’t you,” wrote Mrs. Sessions, “if you don’t find the kind of work you want in Panama, think about coming up to New York and taking stenography? There are lots of chances here for secretaries, etc.”

Una carefully laid down the letter. She went over and straightened her mother’s red wool slippers. She wanted to postpone for an exquisite throbbing moment the joy of announcing to herself that she had made a decision.

She would go to New York, become a stenographer, a secretary to a corporation president, a rich woman, free, responsible.

The fact of making this revolutionary decision so quickly gave her a feeling of power, of already being a business woman.

She galloped up-stairs to the room where her mother was driving the sewing-machine.

“Mumsie!” she cried, “we’re going to New York! I’m going to learn to be a business woman, and the little mother will be all dressed in satin and silks, and dine on what-is-it and peaches and cream—the poem don’t come out right, but, oh, my little mother, we’re going out adventuring, we are!”

She plunged down beside her mother, burrowed her head in her mother’s lap, kissed that hand whose skin was like thinnest wrinkly tissue-paper.

“Why, my little daughter, what is it? Has some one sent for us? Is it the letter from Emma Sessions? What did she say in it?”

“She suggested it, but we are going up independent.”

“But can we afford to?... I would like the draymas and art-galleries and all!”

“We will afford to! We’ll gamble, for once!”

CHAPTER II

UNA GOLDEN had never realized how ugly and petty were the streets of Panama till that evening when she walked down for the mail, spurning the very dust on the sidewalks—and there was plenty to spurn. An old mansion of towers and scalloped shingles, broken-shuttered now and unpainted, with a row of brick stores marching up on its once leisurely lawn. The town-hall, a square wooden barn with a sagging upper porch, from which the mayor would presumably have made proclamations, had there ever been anything in Panama to proclaim about. Staring loafers in front of the Girard House. To Una there was no romance in the sick mansion, no kindly democracy in the village street, no bare freedom in the hills beyond. She was not much to blame; she was a creature of action to whom this constricted town had denied all action except sweeping.

She felt so strong now—she had expected a struggle in persuading her mother to go to New York, but acquiescence had been easy. Una had an exultant joy, a little youthful and cruel, in meeting old Henry Carson and telling him that she was going away, that she “didn’t know for how long; maybe for always.” So hopelessly did he stroke his lean brown neck, which was never quite clean-shaven, that she tried to be kind to him. She promised to write. But she felt, when she had left him, as though she had just been released from prison. To live with him, to give him the right to claw at her with those desiccated hands—she imagined it with a vividness which shocked her, all the while she was listening to his halting regrets.

A dry, dusty September wind whirled down the village street. It choked her.

There would be no dusty winds in New York, but only mellow breezes over marble palaces of efficient business. No Henry Carsons, but slim, alert business men, young of eye and light of tongue.

§ 2

Una Golden had expected to thrill to her first sight of the New York sky-line, crossing on the ferry in mid-afternoon, but it was so much like all the post-card views of it, so stolidly devoid of any surprises, that she merely remarked, “Oh yes, there it is, that’s where I’ll be,” and turned to tuck her mother into a ferry seat and count the suit-cases and assure her that there was no danger of pickpockets. Though, as the ferry sidled along the land, passed an English liner, and came close enough to the shore so that she could see the people who actually lived in the state of blessedness called New York, Una suddenly hugged her mother and cried, “Oh, little mother, we’re going to live here and do things together—everything.”

The familiar faces of Mr. and Mrs. Albert Sessions were awaiting them at the end of the long cavernous walk from the ferry-boat, and New York immediately became a blur of cabs, cobblestones, bales of cotton, long vistas of very dirty streets, high buildings, surface cars, elevateds, shop windows that seemed dark and foreign, and everywhere such a rush of people as made her feel insecure, cling to the Sessionses, and try to ward off the dizziness of the swirl of new impressions. She was daunted for a moment, but she rejoiced in the conviction that she was going to like this madness of multiform energy.

The Sessionses lived in a flat on Amsterdam Avenue near Ninety-sixth Street. They all went up from Cortlandt Street in the Subway, which was still new and miraculous in 1905. For five minutes Una was terrified by the jam of people, the blind roar through tunneled darkness, the sense of being powerlessly hurled forward in a mass of ungovernable steel. But nothing particularly fatal happened; and she grew proud to be part of this black energy, and contentedly swung by a strap.

When they reached the Sessionses’ flat and fell upon the gossip of Panama, Pennsylvania, Una was absent-minded—except when the Sessionses teased her about Henry Carson and Charlie Martindale. The rest of the time, curled up on a black-walnut couch which she had known for years in Panama, and which looked plaintively rustic here in New York, Una gave herself up to impressions of the city: the voices of many children down on Amsterdam Avenue, the shriek of a flat-wheeled surface car, the sturdy pound of trucks, horns of automobiles; the separate sounds scarcely distinguishable in a whirr which seemed visible as a thick, gray-yellow dust-cloud.

Her mother went to lie down; the Sessionses (after an elaborate explanation of why they did not keep a maid) began to get dinner, and Una stole out to see New York by herself.

It all seemed different, at once more real and not so jumbled together, now that she used her own eyes instead of the guidance of that knowing old city bird, Mr. Albert Sessions.

Amsterdam Avenue was, even in the dusk of early autumn, disappointing in its walls of yellow flat-buildings cluttered with fire-escapes, the first stories all devoted to the same sort of shops over and over again—delicatessens, laundries, barber-shops, saloons, groceries, lunch-rooms. She ventured down a side-street, toward a furnace-glow of sunset. West End Avenue was imposing to her in its solid brick and graystone houses, and pavements milky in the waning light. Then came a block of expensive apartments. She was finding the city of golden rewards. Frivolous curtains hung at windows; in a huge apartment-house hall she glimpsed a negro attendant in a green uniform with a monkey-cap and close-set rows of brass buttons; she had a hint of palms—or what looked like palms; of marble and mahogany and tiling, and a flash of people in evening dress. In her plain, “sensible” suit Una tramped past. She was unenvious, because she was going to have all these things soon.

Out of a rather stodgy vision of silk opera wraps and suitors who were like floor-walkers, she came suddenly out on Riverside Drive and the splendor of the city.

A dull city of straight-front unvaried streets is New York. But she aspires in her sky-scrapers; she dreams a garden dream of Georgian days in Gramercy Park; and on Riverside Drive she bares her exquisite breast and wantons in beauty. Here she is sophisticated, yet eager, comparable to Paris and Vienna; and here Una exulted.

Down a polished roadway that reflected every light rolled smart motors, with gay people in the sort of clothes she had studied in advertisements. The driveway was bordered with mist wreathing among the shrubs. Above Una shouldered the tremendous façades of gold-corniced apartment-houses. Across the imperial Hudson everything was enchanted by the long, smoky afterglow, against which the silhouettes of dome and tower and factory chimney stood out like an Orient city.

“Oh, I want all this—it’s mine!... An apartment up there—a big, broad window-seat, and look out on all this. Oh, dear God,” she was unconsciously praying to her vague Panama Wesley Methodist Church God, who gave you things if you were good, “I will work for all this.... And for the little mother, dear mother that’s never had a chance.”

In the step of the slightly stolid girl there was a new lightness, a new ecstasy in walking rapidly through the stirring New York air, as she turned back to the Sessionses’ flat.

§ 3

Later, when the streets fell into order and became normal, Una could never quite identify the vaudeville theater to which the Sessionses took them that evening. The gold-and-ivory walls of the lobby seemed to rise immeasurably to a ceiling flashing with frescoes of light lovers in blue and fluffy white, mincing steps and ardent kisses and flaunting draperies. They climbed a tremendous arching stairway of marble, upon which her low shoes clattered with a pleasant sound. They passed niches hung with heavy curtains of plum-colored velvet, framing the sly peep of plaster fauns, and came out on a balcony stretching as wide as the sea at twilight, looking down on thousands of people in the orchestra below, up at a vast golden dome lighted by glowing spheres hung with diamonds, forward at a towering proscenic arch above which slim, nude goddesses in bas-relief floated in a languor which obsessed her, set free the bare brown laughing nymph that hides in every stiff Una in semi-mourning.

Nothing so diverting as that program has ever been witnessed. The funny men with their solemn mock-battles, their extravagance in dress, their galloping wit, made her laugh till she wanted them to stop. The singers were bell-voiced; the dancers graceful as clouds, and just touched with a beguiling naughtiness; and in the playlet there was a chill intensity that made her shudder when the husband accused the wife whom he suspected, oh, so absurdly, as Una indignantly assured herself.

The entertainment was pure magic, untouched by human clumsiness, rare and spellbound as a stilly afternoon in oak woods by a lake.

They went to a marvelous café, and Mr. Sessions astounded them by the urbanity with which he hurried captains and waiters and ’bus-boys, and ordered lobster and coffee, and pretended that he was going to be wicked and have wine and cigarettes.

Months afterward, when she was going to vaudeville by herself, Una tried to identify the theater of wizardry, but she never could. The Sessionses couldn’t remember which theater it was; they thought it was the Pitt, but surely they must have been mistaken, for the Pitt was a shanty daubed with grotesque nudes, rambling and pretentious, with shockingly amateurish programs. And afterward, on the occasion or two when they went out to dinner with the Sessionses, it seemed to Una that Mr. Sessions was provincial in restaurants, too deprecatingly friendly with the waiters, too hesitating about choosing dinner.

§ 4

Whiteside and Schleusner’s College of Commerce, where Una learned the art of business, occupied only five shabby rooms of crepuscular windows and perpetually dusty corners, and hard, glistening wall-paint, in a converted (but not sanctified) old dwelling-house on West Eighteenth Street. The faculty were six: Mr. Whiteside, an elaborate pomposity who smoothed his concrete brow as though he had a headache, and took obvious pride in being able to draw birds with Spencerian strokes. Mr. Schleusner, who was small and vulgar and déclassé and really knew something about business. A shabby man like a broken-down bookkeeper, silent and diligent and afraid. A towering man with a red face, who kept licking his lips with a small red triangle of tongue, and taught English—commercial college English—in a bombastic voice of finicky correctness, and always smelled of cigar smoke. An active young Jewish New-Yorker of wonderful black hair, elfin face, tilted hat, and smart clothes, who did something on the side in real estate. Finally, a thin widow, who was so busy and matter-of-fact that she was no more individualized than a street-car. Any one of them was considered competent to teach any “line,” and among them they ground out instruction in shorthand, typewriting, book-keeping, English grammar, spelling, composition (with a special view to the construction of deceptive epistles), and commercial geography. Once or twice a week, language-masters from a linguistic mill down the street were had in to chatter the more vulgar phrases of French, German, and Spanish.

A cluttered, wheezy omnibus of a school, but in it Una rode to spacious and beautiful hours of learning. It was even more to her than is the art-school to the yearner who has always believed that she has a talent for painting; for the yearner has, even as a child, been able to draw and daub and revel in the results; while for Una this was the first time in her life when her labor seemed to count for something. Her school-teaching had been a mere time-filler. Now she was at once the responsible head of the house and a seer of the future.

Most of the girls in the school learned nothing but shorthand and typewriting, but to these Una added English grammar, spelling, and letter-composition. After breakfast at the little flat which she had taken with her mother, she fled to the school. She drove into her books, she delighted in the pleasure of her weary teachers when she snapped out a quick answer to questions, or typed a page correctly, or was able to remember the shorthand symbol for a difficult word like “psychologize.”

Her belief in the sacredness of the game was boundless.

CHAPTER III

EXCEPT for the young man in the bank, the new young man in the hardware-store, and the proprietors of the new Broadway Clothing Shop, Una had known most of the gallants in Panama, Pennsylvania, from knickerbocker days; she remembered their bony, boyish knees and their school-day whippings too well to be romantic about them. But in the commercial college she was suddenly associated with seventy entirely new and interesting males. So brief were the courses, so irregular the classifications, that there was no spirit of seniority to keep her out of things; and Una, with her fever of learning, her instinctive common sense about doing things in the easiest way, stood out among the girl students. The young men did not buzz about her as they did about the slim, diabolic, star-eyed girl from Brooklyn, in her tempting low-cut blouses, or the intense, curly-headed, boyish, brown Jew girl, or the ardent dancers and gigglers. But Una’s self-sufficient eagerness gave a fervor to her blue eyes, and a tilt to her commonplace chin, which made her almost pretty, and the young men liked to consult her about things. She was really more prominent here, in a school of one hundred and seventy, than in her Panama high school with its enrolment of seventy.

Panama, Pennsylvania, had never regarded Una as a particularly capable young woman. Dozens of others were more masterful at trimming the Christmas tree for Wesley Methodist Church, preparing for the annual picnic of the Art Needlework Coterie, arranging a surprise donation party for the Methodist pastor, even spring house-cleaning. But she had been well spoken of as a marketer, a cook, a neighbor who would take care of your baby while you went visiting—because these tasks had seemed worth while to her. She was more practical than either Panama or herself believed. All these years she had, without knowing that she was philosophizing, without knowing that there was a world-wide inquiry into woman’s place, been trying to find work that needed her. Her father’s death had freed her; had permitted her to toil for her mother, cherish her, be regarded as useful. Instantly—still without learning that there was such a principle as feminism—she had become a feminist, demanding the world and all the fullness thereof as her field of labor.

And now, in this fumbling school, she was beginning to feel the theory of efficiency, the ideal of Big Business.

For “business,” that one necessary field of activity to which the egotistic arts and sciences and theologies and military puerilities are but servants, that long-despised and always valiant effort to unify the labor of the world, is at last beginning to be something more than dirty smithing. No longer does the business man thank the better classes for permitting him to make and distribute bread and motor-cars and books. No longer does he crawl to the church to buy pardon for usury. Business is being recognized—and is recognizing itself—as ruler of the world.

With this consciousness of power it is reforming its old, petty, half-hearted ways; its idea of manufacture as a filthy sort of tinkering; of distribution as chance peddling and squalid shopkeeping; it is feverishly seeking efficiency.... In its machinery.... But, like all monarchies, it must fail unless it becomes noble of heart. So long as capital and labor are divided, so long as the making of munitions or injurious food is regarded as business, so long as Big Business believes that it exists merely to enrich a few of the lucky or the well born or the nervously active, it will not be efficient, but deficient. But the vision of an efficiency so broad that it can be kindly and sure, is growing—is discernible at once in the scientific business man and the courageous labor-unionist.

That vision Una Golden feebly comprehended. Where she first beheld it cannot be said. Certainly not in the lectures of her teachers, humorless and unvisioned grinds, who droned that by divine edict letters must end with a “yours truly” one space to the left of the middle of the page; who sniffed at card-ledgers as new-fangled nonsense, and, at their most inspired, croaked out such platitudes as: “Look out for the pennies and the pounds will look out for themselves,” or “The man who fails is the man who watches the clock.”

Nor was the vision of the inspired Big Business that shall be, to be found in the books over which Una labored—the flat, maroon-covered, dusty, commercial geography, the arid book of phrases and rules-of-the-thumb called “Fish’s Commercial English,” the manual of touch-typewriting, or the shorthand primer that, with its grotesque symbols and numbered exercises and yellow pages dog-eared by many owners, looked like an old-fashioned Arabic grammar headachily perused in some divinity-school library.

Her vision of it all must have come partly from the eager talk of a few of the students—the girl who wasn’t ever going to give up her job, even if she did marry; the man who saw a future in these motion pictures; the shaggy-haired zealot who talked about profit-sharing (which was a bold radicalism back in 1905; almost as subversive of office discipline as believing in unions). Partly it came from the new sorts of business magazines for the man who didn’t, like his fathers, insist, “I guess I can run my business without any outside interference,” but sought everywhere for systems and charts and new markets and the scientific mind.

§ 2

While her power of faith and vision was satisfied by the largeness of the city and by her chance to work, there was quickening in Una a shy, indefinable, inner life of tenderness and desire for love. She did not admit it, but she observed the young men about her with an interest that was as diverting as her ambition.

At first they awed her by their number and their strangeness. But when she seemed to be quite their equal in this school of the timorously clerical, she began to look at them level-eyed.... A busy, commonplace, soft-armed, pleasant, good little thing she was; glancing at them through eye-glasses attached to a gold chain over her ear, not much impressed now, slightly ashamed by the delight she took in winning their attention by brilliant recitations.... She decided that most of them were earnest-minded but intelligent serfs, not much stronger than the girls who were taking stenography for want of anything better to do. They sprawled and looked vacuous as they worked in rows in the big study-hall, with its hard blue walls showing the marks of two removed partitions, its old iron fireplace stuffed with rubbers and overshoes and crayon-boxes. As a provincial, Una disliked the many Jews among them, and put down their fervor for any sort of learning to acquisitiveness. The rest she came to despise for the clumsy slowness with which they learned even the simplest lessons. And to all of them she—who was going to be rich and powerful, directly she was good for one hundred words a minute at stenography!—felt disdainfully superior, because they were likely to be poor the rest of their lives.

In a twilight walk on Washington Heights, a walk of such vigor and happy absorption with new problems as she had never known in Panama, she caught herself being contemptuous about their frayed poverty. With a sharp emotional sincerity, she rebuked herself for such sordidness, mocked herself for assuming that she was already rich.

Even out of this mass of clerklings emerged two or three who were interesting: Sam Weintraub, a young, active, red-headed, slim-waisted Jew, who was born in Brooklyn. He smoked large cigars with an air, knew how to wear his clothes, and told about playing tennis at the Prospect Athletic Club. He would be a smart secretary or confidential clerk some day, Una was certain; he would own a car and be seen in evening clothes and even larger cigars at after-theater suppers. She was rather in awe of his sophistication. He was the only man who made her feel like a Freshman.

J. J. Todd, a reticent, hesitating, hard-working man of thirty, from Chatham on Cape Cod. It was he who, in noon-time arguments, grimly advocated profit-sharing, which Sam Weintraub debonairly dismissed as “socialistic.”

And, most appealing to her, enthusiastic young Sanford Hunt, inarticulate, but longing for a chance to attach himself to some master. Weintraub and Todd had desks on either side of her; they had that great romantic virtue, propinquity. But Sanford Hunt she had noticed, in his corner across the room, because he glanced about with such boyish loneliness.

Sanford Hunt helped her find a rubber in the high-school-like coat-room on a rainy day when the girls were giggling and the tremendous swells of the institution were whooping and slapping one another on the back and acting as much as possible like their ideal of college men—an ideal presumably derived from motion pictures and college playlets in vaudeville. Una saw J. J. Todd gawping at her, but not offering to help, while a foreshortened Sanford groped along the floor, under the dusty line of coats, for her missing left rubber. Sanford came up with the rubber, smiled like a nice boy, and walked with her to the Subway.

He didn’t need much encouragement to tell his ambitions. He was twenty-one—three years younger than herself. He was a semi-orphan, born in Newark; had worked up from office-boy to clerk in the office of a huge Jersey City paint company; had saved money to take a commercial course; was going back to the paint company, and hoped to be office-manager there. He had a conviction that “the finest man in the world” was Mr. Claude Lowry, president of the Lowry Paint Company; the next finest, Mr. Ernest Lowry, vice-president and general manager; the next, Mr. Julius Schwirtz, one of the two city salesmen—Mr. Schwirtz having occupied a desk next to his own for two years—and that “the best paint on the market to-day is Lowry’s Lasting Paint—simply no getting around it.”

In the five-minute walk over to the Eighteenth Street station of the Subway, Sanford had lastingly impressed Una by his devotion to the job; eager and faithful as the glory that a young subaltern takes in his regiment. She agreed with him that the dour J. J. Todd was “crazy” in his theories about profit-sharing and selling stocks to employees. While she was with young Sanford, Una found herself concurring that “the bosses know so much better about all those things—gee whiz! they’ve had so much more experience—besides you can’t expect them to give away all their profits to please these walking delegates or a Cape Cod farmer like Todd! All these theories don’t do a fellow any good; what he wants is to stick on a job and make good.”

Though, in keeping with the general school-boyishness of the institution, the study-room supervisors tried to prevent conversation, there was always a current of whispering and low talk, and Sam Weintraub gave Una daily reports of the tennis, the dances, the dinners at the Prospect Athletic Club. Her evident awe of his urban amusements pleased him. He told his former idol, the slim, blond giggler, that she was altogether too fresh for a Bronx Kid, and he basked in Una’s admiration. Through him she had a revelation of the New York in which people actually were born, which they took casually, as she did Panama.

She tried consciously to become a real New-Yorker herself. After lunch—her home-made lunch of sandwiches and an apple—which she ate in the buzzing, gossiping study-hall at noon-hour, she explored the city. Sometimes Sanford Hunt begged to go with her. Once Todd stalked along and embarrassed her by being indignant over an anti-socialist orator in Madison Square. Once, on Fifth Avenue, she met Sam Weintraub, and he nonchalantly pointed out, in a passing motor, a man whom he declared to be John D. Rockefeller.

Even at lunch-hour Una could not come to much understanding with the girls of the commercial college. They seemed alternately third-rate stenographers, and very haughty urbanites who knew all about “fellows” and “shows” and “glad rags.” Except for good-natured, square-rigged Miss Moynihan, and the oldish, anxious, industrious Miss Ingalls, who, like Una, came from a small town, and the adorably pretty little Miss Moore, whom you couldn’t help loving, Una saw the girls of the school only in a mass.

It was Sam Weintraub, J. J. Todd, and Sanford Hunt whom Una watched and liked, and of whom she thought when the school authorities pompously invited them all to a dance early in November.

§ 3

The excitement, the giggles, the discussions of girdles and slippers and hair-waving and men, which filled the study-hall at noon and the coat-room at closing hour, was like midnight silence compared with the tumult in Una’s breast when she tried to make herself believe that either her blue satin evening dress or her white-and-pink frock of “novelty crêpe” was attractive enough for the occasion. The crêpe was the older, but she had worn the blue satin so much that now the crêpe suddenly seemed the newer, the less soiled. After discussions with her mother, which involved much holding up of the crêpe and the tracing of imaginary diagrams with a forefinger, she decided to put a new velvet girdle and new sleeve ruffles on the crêpe, and then she said, “It will have to do.”

Very different is the dressing of the girl who isn’t quite pretty, nor at all rich, from the luxurious joy which the beautiful woman takes in her new toilettes. Instead of the faint, shivery wonder as to whether men will realize how exquisitely the line of a new bodice accentuates the molding of her neck, the unpretty girl hopes that no one will observe how unevenly her dress hangs, how pointed and red and rough are her elbows, how clumsily waved her hair. “I don’t think anybody will notice,” she sighs, and is contemptuously conscious of her own stolid, straight, healthy waist, while her mother flutters about and pretends to believe that she is curved like a houri, like Helen of Troy, like Isolde at eighteen.

Una was touched by her mother’s sincere eagerness in trying to make her pretty. Poor little mother. It had been hard on her to sit alone all day in a city flat, with no Panama neighbors to drop in on her, no meeting of the Panama Study Club, and with Una bringing home her books to work aloof all evening.

The day before the dance, J. J. Todd dourly asked her if he might call for her and take her home. Una accepted hesitatingly. As she did so, she unconsciously glanced at the decorative Sam Weintraub, who was rocking on his toes and flirting with Miss Moore, the kittenish belle of the school.

She must have worried for fifteen minutes over the question of whether she was going to wear a hat or a scarf, trying to remember the best social precedents of Panama as laid down by Mrs. Dr. Smith, trying to recall New York women as she had once or twice seen them in the evening on Broadway. Finally, she jerked a pale-blue chiffon scarf over her mildly pretty hair, pulled on her new long, white kid gloves, noted miserably that the gloves did not quite cover her pebbly elbows, and snapped at her fussing mother: “Oh, it doesn’t matter. I’m a perfect sight, anyway, so what’s the use of worrying!”

Her mother looked so hurt and bewildered that Una pulled her down into a chair, and, kneeling on the floor with her arms about her, crooned, “Oh, I’m just nervous, mumsie dear; working so hard and all. I’ll have the best time, now you’ve made me so pretty for the dance.” Clasped thus, an intense brooding affection holding them and seeming to fill the shabby sitting-room, they waited for the coming of her Tristan, her chevalier, the flat-footed J. J. Todd.

They heard Todd shamble along the hall. They wriggled with concealed laughter and held each other tighter when he stopped at the door of the flat and blew his nervous nose in a tremendous blast.... More vulgar possibly than the trumpetry which heralded the arrival of Lancelot at a château, but on the whole quite as effective.

She set out with him, observing his pitiful, home-cleaned, black sack-suit, and home-shined, expansive, black boots and ready-made tie, while he talked easily, and was merely rude about dances and clothes and the weather.

In the study-hall, which had been cleared of all seats except for a fringe along the walls, and was unevenly hung with school flags and patriotic bunting, Una found the empty-headed time-servers, the Little Folk, to whom she was so superior in the class-room. Brooklyn Jews used to side-street dance-halls, Bronx girls who went to the bartenders’ ball, and the dinner and grand ball of the Clamchowder Twenty, they laughed and talked and danced—all three at once—with an ease which dismayed her.

To Una Golden, of Panama, the waltz and the two-step were solemn affairs. She could make her feet go in a one-two-three triangle with approximate accuracy, if she didn’t take any liberties with them. She was relieved to find that Todd danced with a heavy accuracy which kept her from stumbling.... But their performance was solemn and joyless, while by her skipped Sam Weintraub, in evening clothes with black velvet collar and cuffs, swinging and making fantastic dips with the lovely Miss Moore, who cuddled into his arms and swayed to his swing.

“Let’s cut out the next,” said Todd, and she consented, though Sanford Hunt came boyishly, blushingly up to ask her for a dance.... She was intensely aware that she was a wall-flower, in a row with the anxious Miss Ingalls and the elderly frump, Miss Fisle. Sam Weintraub seemed to avoid her, and, though she tried to persuade herself that his greasy, curly, red hair and his pride of evening clothes and sharp face were blatantly Jewish, she knew that she admired his atmosphere of gorgeousness and was in despair at being shut out of it. She even feared that Sanford Hunt hadn’t really wanted to dance with her, and she wilfully ignored his frequent glances of friendliness and his efforts to introduce her and his “lady friend.” She was silent and hard, while poor Todd, trying not to be a radical and lecture on single-tax or municipal ownership, attempted to be airy about the theater, which meant the one show he had seen since he had come to New York.

From vague dissatisfaction she drifted into an active resentment at being shut out of the world of pretty things, of clinging gowns and graceful movement and fragrant rooms. While Todd was taking her home she was saying to herself over and over, “Nope; it’s just as bad as parties at Panama. Never really enjoyed ’em. I’m out of it. I’ll stick to my work. Oh, drat it!”

§ 4

Blindly, in a daily growing faith in her commercial future, she shut out the awkward gaieties of the school, ignored Todd and Sanford Hunt and Sam Weintraub, made no effort to cultivate the adorable Miss Moore’s rather flattering friendliness for her. She was like a girl grind in a coeducational college who determines to head the class and to that devotes all of a sexless energy.

Only Una was not sexless. Though she hadn’t the dancing-girl’s oblivious delight in pleasure, though her energetic common sense and willingness to serve had turned into a durable plodding, Una was alive, normal, desirous of love, as the flower-faced girl grind of the college so often is not, to the vast confusion of numerous ardent young gentlemen.

She could not long forbid herself an interest in Sanford Hunt and Sam Weintraub; she even idealized Todd as a humble hero, a self-made and honest man, which he was, though Una considered herself highly charitable to him.

Sweet to her—even when he told her that he was engaged, even when it was evident that he regarded her as an older sister or as a very young and understanding aunt—was Sanford Hunt’s liking. “Why do you like me—if you do?” she demanded one lunch-hour, when he had brought her a bar of milk-chocolate.

“Oh, I dun’no’; you’re so darn honest, and you got so much more sense than this bunch of Bronx totties. Gee! they’ll make bum stenogs. I know. I’ve worked in an office. They’ll keep their gum and a looking-glass in the upper right-hand drawer of their typewriter desks, and the old man will call them down eleventy times a day, and they’ll marry the shipping-clerk first time he sneaks out from behind a box. But you got sense, and somehow—gee! I never know how to express things—glad I’m taking this English composition stuff—oh, you just seem to understand a guy. I never liked that Yid Weintraub till you made me see how darn clever and nice he really is, even if he does wear spats.”

Sanford told her often that he wished she was going to come over to the Lowry Paint Company to work, when she finished. He had entered the college before her; he would be through somewhat earlier; he was going back to the paint company and would try to find an opening for her there. He wanted her to meet Mr. Julius Edward Schwirtz, the Manhattan salesman of the company.

When Mr. Schwirtz was in that part of town, interviewing the department-store buyers, he called up Sanford Hunt, and Sanford insisted that she come out to lunch with Schwirtz and himself and his girl. She went shyly.

Sanford’s sweetheart proved to be as clean and sweet as himself, but mute, smiling instead of speaking, inclined to admire every one, without much discrimination. Sanford was very proud, very eager as host, and his boyish admiration of all his guests gave a certain charm to the corner of the crude German sausage-and-schnitzel restaurant where they lunched. Una worked at making the party as successful as possible, and was cordial to Mr. Julius Edward Schwirtz, the paint salesman.

Mr. Schwirtz was forty or forty-one, a red-faced, clipped-mustached, derby-hatted average citizen. He was ungrammatical and jocose; he panted a good deal and gurgled his soup; his nails were ragged-edged, his stupid brown tie uneven, and there were signs of a growing grossness and fatty unwieldiness about his neck, his shoulders, his waist. But he was affable. He quietly helped Sanford in ordering lunch, to the great economy of embarrassment. He was smilingly ready to explain to Una how a paint company office was run; what chances there were for a girl. He seemed to know his business, he didn’t gossip, and his heavy, coarse-lipped smile was almost sweet when he said to Una, “Makes a hard-cased old widower like me pretty lonely to see this nice kid and girly here. Eh? Wish I had some children like them myself.”

He wasn’t vastly different from Henry Carson, this Mr. Schwirtz, but he had a mechanical city smartness in his manner and a jocular energy which the stringy-necked Henry quite lacked.

Because she liked to be with Sanford Hunt, hoped to get from Mr. Julius Edward Schwirtz still more of the feeling of how actual business men do business, she hoped for another lunch.

But a crisis unexpected and alarming came to interrupt her happy progress to a knowledge of herself and men.

§ 5

The Goldens had owned no property in Panama, Pennsylvania; they had rented their house. Captain Lew Golden, who was so urgent in advising others to purchase real estate—with a small, justifiable commission to himself—had never quite found time to decide on his own real-estate investments. When they had come to New York, Una and her mother had given up the house and sold the heavier furniture, the big beds, the stove. The rest of the furniture they had brought to the city and installed in a little flat way up on 148th Street.

Her mother was, Una declared, so absolutely the lady that it was a crying shame to think of her immured here in their elevatorless tenement; this new, clean, barren building of yellow brick, its face broken out with fire-escapes. It had narrow halls, stairs of slate treads and iron rails, and cheap wooden doorways which had begun to warp the minute the structure was finished—and sold. The bright-green burlap wall-covering in the hallways had faded in less than a year to the color of dry grass. The janitor grew tired every now and then. He had been markedly diligent at first, but he was already giving up the task of keeping the building clean. It was one of, and typical of, a mile of yellow brick tenements; it was named after an African orchid of great loveliness, and it was filled with clerks, motormen, probationer policemen, and enormously prolific women in dressing-sacques.

The Goldens had three rooms and bath. A small linoleous gas-stove kitchen. A bedroom with standing wardrobe, iron bed, and just one graceful piece of furniture—Una’s dressing-table; a room pervasively feminine in its scent and in the little piles of lingerie which Mrs. Golden affected more, not less, as she grew older. The living-room, with stiff, brown, woolen brocade chairs, transplanted from their Panama home, a red plush sofa, two large oak-framed Biblical pictures—“The Wedding-feast at Cana,” and “Solomon in His Temple.” This living-room had never been changed since the day of their moving in. Una repeatedly coveted the German color-prints she saw in shop windows, but she had to economize.

She planned that when she should succeed they would have such an apartment of white enamel and glass doors and mahogany as she saw described in the women’s magazines. She realized mentally that her mother must be lonely in the long hours of waiting for her return, but she who was busy all day could never feel emotionally how great was that loneliness, and she expected her mother to be satisfied with the future.

Quite suddenly, a couple of weeks after the dance, when they were talking about the looming topic—what kind of work Una would be able to get when she should have completed school—her mother fell violently a-weeping; sobbed, “Oh, Una baby, I want to go home. I’m so lonely here—just nobody but you and the Sessionses. Can’t we go back to Panama? You don’t seem to really know what you are going to do.”

“Why, mother—”

Una loved her mother, yet she felt a grim disgust, rather than pity.... Just when she had been working so hard! And for her mother as much as for herself.... She stalked over to the table, severely rearranged the magazines, slammed down a newspaper, and turned, angrily. “Why, can’t you see? I can’t give up my work now.”

“Couldn’t you get something to do in Panama, dearie?”

“You know perfectly well that I tried.”

“But maybe now, with your college course and all—even if it took a little longer to get something there, we’d be right among the folks we know—”

“Mother, can’t you understand that we have only a little over three hundred dollars now? If we moved again and everything, we wouldn’t have two hundred dollars to live on. Haven’t you any sense of finances?”

“You must not talk to me that way, my daughter!”

A slim, fine figure of hurt-dignity, Mrs. Golden left the room, lay down in the bedroom, her face away from the door where Una stood in perplexity. Una ran to her, kissed her shoulder, begged for forgiveness. Her mother patted her cheek, and sobbed, “Oh, it doesn’t matter,” in a tone so forlorn and lonely that it did matter, terribly. The sadness of it tortured Una while she was realizing that her mother had lost all practical comprehension of the details of life, was become a child, trusting everything to her daughter, yet retaining a power of suffering such as no child can know.

It had been easy to bring her mother here, to start a career. Both of them had preconceived a life of gaiety and beauty, of charming people and pictures and concerts. But all those graces were behind a dusty wall of shorthand and typewriting. Una’s struggle in coming to New York had just begun.

Gently arbitrary, dearer than ever to Una in her helpless longing for kindly neighbors and the familiar places, Mrs. Golden went on hoping that she could persuade Una to go back to Panama. She never seemed to realize that their capital wasn’t increasing as time passed. Sometimes impatient at her obtuseness, sometimes passionate with comprehending tenderness, Una devoted herself to her, and Mr. Schwirtz and Sanford Hunt and Sam Weintraub and Todd faded. She treasured her mother’s happiness at their Christmas dinner with the Sessionses. She encouraged the Sessionses to come up to the flat as often as they could, and she lulled her mother to a tolerable calm boredom. Before it was convenient to think of men again, her school-work was over.

The commercial college had a graduation once a month. On January 15, 1906, Una finished her course, regretfully said good-by to Sam Weintraub, and to Sanford Hunt, who had graduated in mid-December, but had come back for “class commencement”; and at the last moment she hesitated so long over J. J. Todd’s hints about calling some day, that he was discouraged and turned away. Una glanced about the study-hall—the first place where she had ever been taken seriously as a worker—and marched off to her first battle in the war of business.

CHAPTER IV

SANFORD HUNT telephoned to Una that he and Mr. Julius Edward Schwirtz—whom he called “Eddie”—had done their best to find an “opening” for her in the office of the Lowry Paint Company, but that there was no chance.

The commercial college gave her the names of several possible employers, but they all wanted approximate perfection at approximately nothing a week. After ten days of panic-stricken waiting at the employment office of a typewriter company, and answering want advertisements, the typewriter people sent her to the office of the Motor and Gas Gazette, a weekly magazine for the trade. In this atmosphere of the literature of lubricating oil and drop forgings and body enamels, as an eight-dollar-a-week copyist, Una first beheld the drama and romance of the office world.

§ 2

There is plenty of romance in business. Fine, large, meaningless, general terms like romance and business can always be related. They take the place of thinking, and are highly useful to optimists and lecturers.

But in the world of business there is a bewildered new Muse of Romance, who is clad not in silvery tissue of dreams, but in a neat blue suit that won’t grow too shiny under the sleeves.

Adventure now, with Una, in the world of business; of offices and jobs and tired, ordinary people who know such reality of romance as your masquerading earl, your shoddy Broadway actress, or your rosily amorous dairy-maid could never imagine. The youths of poetry and of the modern motor-car fiction make a long diversion of love; while the sleezy-coated office-man who surprises a look of humanness in the weary eyes of the office-woman, knows that he must compress all the wonder of madness into five minutes, because the Chief is prowling about, glancing meaningly at the little signs that declare, “Your time is your employer’s money; don’t steal it.”

A world is this whose noblest vista is composed of desks and typewriters, filing-cases and insurance calendars, telephones, and the bald heads of men who believe dreams to be idiotic. Here, no galleon breasts the sky-line; no explorer in evening clothes makes love to an heiress. Here ride no rollicking cowboys, nor heroes of the great European war. It is a world whose crises you cannot comprehend unless you have learned that the difference between a 2-A pencil and a 2-B pencil is at least equal to the contrast between London and Tibet; unless you understand why a normally self-controlled young woman may have a week of tragic discomfort because she is using a billing-machine instead of her ordinary correspondence typewriter. The shifting of the water-cooler from the front office to the packing-room may be an epochal event to a copyist who apparently has no human existence beyond bending over a clacking typewriter, who seems to have no home, no family, no loves; in whom all pride and wonder of life and all transforming drama seem to be satisfied by the possession of a new V-necked blouse. The moving of the water-cooler may mean that she must now pass the sentinel office-manager; that therefore she no longer dares break the incredible monotony by expeditions to get glasses of water. As a consequence she gives up the office and marries unhappily.

A vast, competent, largely useless cosmos of offices. It spends much energy in causing advertisements of beer and chewing-gum and union suits and pot-cleansers to spread over the whole landscape. It marches out ponderous battalions to sell a brass pin. It evokes shoes that are uncomfortable, hideous, and perishable, and touchingly hopes that all women will aid the cause of good business by wearing them. It turns noble valleys into fields for pickles. It compels men whom it has never seen to toil in distant factories and produce useless wares, which are never actually brought into the office, but which it nevertheless sells to the heathen in the Solomon Islands in exchange for commodities whose very names it does not know; and in order to perform this miracle of transmutation it keeps stenographers so busy that they change from dewy girls into tight-lipped spinsters before they discover life.

The reason for it all, nobody who is actually engaged in it can tell you, except the bosses, who believe that these sacred rites of composing dull letters and solemnly filing them away are observed in order that they may buy the large automobiles in which they do not have time to take the air. Efficiency of production they have learned; efficiency of life they still consider an effeminate hobby.

An unreasonable world, sacrificing bird-song and tranquil dusk and high golden noons to selling junk—yet it rules us. And life lives there. The office is filled with thrills of love and distrust and ambition. Each alley between desks quivers with secret romance as ceaselessly as a battle-trench, or a lane in Normandy.

§ 3

Una’s first view of the Motor and Gas Gazette was of an overwhelming mass of desks and files and books, and a confusing, spying crowd of strange people, among whom the only safe, familiar persons were Miss Moynihan, the good-natured solid block of girl whom she had known at the commercial college, and Mr. S. Herbert Ross, the advertising-manager, who had hired her. Mr. Ross was a poet of business; a squat, nervous little man, whose hair was cut in a Dutch bang, straight across his forehead, and who always wore a black bow tie and semi-clerical black clothes. He had eyed Una amusedly, asked her what was her reaction to green and crimson posters, and given her a little book by himself, “R U A Time-clock, Mr. Man?” which, in large and tremendously black type, related two stories about the youth of Carnegie, and strongly advocated industry, correspondence schools, and expensive advertising. When Una entered the office, as a copyist, Mr. S. Herbert Ross turned her over to the office-manager, and thereafter ignored her; but whenever she saw him in pompous conference with editors and advertisers she felt proudly that she knew him.

The commercial college had trained her to work with a number of people, as she was now to do in the office; but in the seriousness and savage continuity of its toil, the office was very different. There was no let-up; she couldn’t shirk for a day or two, as she had done at the commercial college. It was not so much that she was afraid of losing her job as that she came to see herself as part of a chain. The others, beyond, were waiting for her; she mustn’t hold them up. That was her first impression of the office system, that and the insignificance of herself in the presence of the office-hierarchy—manager above manager and the Mysterious Owner beyond all. She was alone; once she transgressed they would crush her. They had no personal interest in her, none of them, except her classmate, Miss Moynihan, who smiled at her and went out to lunch with her.

They two did not dare to sit over parcels of lunch with the curious other girls. Before fifteen-cent lunches of baked apples, greasy Napoleons, and cups of coffee, at a cheap restaurant, Miss Moynihan and she talked about the office-manager, the editors, the strain of copying all day, and they united in lyric hatred of the lieutenant of the girls, a satiric young woman who was a wonderful hater. Una had regarded Miss Moynihan as thick and stupid, but not when she had thought of falling in love with Charlie Martindale at a dance at Panama, not in her most fervid hours of comforting her mother, had she been so closely in sympathy with any human being as she was with Miss Moynihan when they went over and over the problems of office politics, office favorites, office rules, office customs.

The customs were simple: Certain hours for arrival, for lunch, for leaving; women’s retiring-room embarrassedly discovered to be on the right behind the big safe; water-cooler in the center of the stenographers’ room. But the office prejudices, the taboos, could not be guessed. They offered you every possible chance of “queering yourself.” Miss Moynihan, on her very first day, discovered, perspiringly, that you must never mention the Gazette’s rival, the Internal Combustion News. The Gazette’s attitude was that the News did not exist—except when the Gazette wanted the plate of an advertisement which the News was to forward. You mustn’t chew gum in the office; you were to ask favors of the lieutenant, not of the office-manager; and you mustn’t be friendly with Mr. Bush of the circulation department, nor with Miss Caldwell, the filing-clerk. Why they were taboo Una never knew; it was an office convention; they seemed pleasant and proper people enough.

She was initiated into the science of office supplies. In the commercial college the authorities had provided stenographers’ note-books and pencils, and the representatives of typewriter companies had given lectures on cleaning and oiling typewriters, putting in new ribbons, adjusting tension-wheels. But Una had not realized how many tools she had to know——

Desks, filing-cabinets, mimeographs, adding-machines, card indexes, desk calendars, telephone-extensions, adjustable desk-lights. Wire correspondence-baskets, erasers, carbon paper, type-brushes, dust-rags, waste-baskets. Pencils, hard and soft, black and blue and red. Pens, pen-points, backing-sheets, note-books, paper-clips. Mucilage, paste, stationery; the half-dozen sorts of envelopes and letter-heads.

Tools were these, as important in her trade as the masthead and black flag, the cutlasses and crimson sashes, the gold doubloons and damsels fair of pirate fiction; or the cheese and cream, old horses and slumberous lanes of rustic comedy. As important, and perhaps to be deemed as romantic some day; witness the rhapsodic advertisements of filing-cabinets that are built like battle-ships; of carbon-paper that is magic-inked and satin-smooth.

Not as priest or soldier or judge does youth seek honor to-day, but as a man of offices. The business subaltern, charming and gallant as the jungle-gallopers of Kipling, drills files, not of troops, but of correspondence. The artist plays the keys, not of pianos, but of typewriters. Desks, not decks; courts of office-buildings, not of palaces—these are the stuff of our latter-day drama. Not through wolf-haunted forests nor purple cañons, but through tiled hallways and elevators move our heroes of to-day.

And our heroine is important not because she is an Amazon or a Ramona, but because she is representative of some millions of women in business, and because, in a vague but undiscouraged way, she keeps on inquiring what women in business can do to make human their existence of loveless routine.

§ 4

Una spent much of her time in copying over and over—a hundred times, two hundred times—form-letters soliciting advertising, letters too personal in appearance to be multigraphed. She had lists of manufacturers of motor-car accessories, of makers of lubricating oils, of distributors of ball-bearings and speedometers and springs and carburetors and compositions for water-proofing automobile tops.

Sometimes she was requisitioned by the editorial department to copy in form legible for the printer the rough items sent in by outsiders for publication in the Gazette. Una, like most people of Panama, had believed that there was something artistic about the office of any publication. One would see editors—wonderful men like grand dukes, prone to lunch with the President. But there was nothing artistic about the editorial office of the Gazette—several young men in shirt-sleeves and green celluloid eye-shades, very slangy and pipe-smelly, and an older man with unpressed trousers and ragged mustache. Nor was there anything literary in the things that Una copied for the editorial department; just painfully handwritten accounts of the meeting of the Southeastern Iowa Auto-dealers’ Association; or boasts about the increased sales of Roadeater Tires, a page originally smartly typed, but cut and marked up by the editors.

Lists and letters and items, over and over; sitting at her typewriter till her shoulder-blades ached and she had to shut her eyes to the blur of the keys. The racket of office noises all day. The three-o’clock hour when she felt that she simply could not endure the mill till five o’clock. No interest in anything she wrote. Then the blessed hour of release, the stretching of cramped legs, and the blind creeping to the Subway, the crush in the train, and home to comfort the mother who had been lonely all day.

Such was Una’s routine in these early months of 1906. After the novelty of the first week it was all rigidly the same, except that distinct personalities began to emerge from the mass.

Especially the personality of Walter Babson.

§ 5

Out of the mist of strange faces, blurred hordes of people who swaggered up the office aisle so knowingly, and grinned at her when she asked questions, individualities began to take form:

Miss Moynihan; the Jewish stenographer with the laughing lips and hot eyes; the four superior older girls in a corner, the still more superior girl lieutenant, and the office-manager, who was the least superior of all; the telephone-girl; the office-boys; Mr. S. Herbert Ross and his assistant; the managing editor; a motor magnate whose connection was mysterious; the owner, a courteous, silent, glancing man who was reported to be hard and “stingy.”

Other people still remained unidentifiable to her, but the office appeared smaller and less formidable in a month. Out of each nine square feet of floor space in the office a novel might have been made: the tale of the managing editor’s neurotic wife; the tragedy of Chubby Hubbard, the stupid young editor who had been a college football star, then an automobile racer, then a failure. And indeed there was a whole novel, a story told and retold, in the girls’ gossip about each of the men before whom they were so demure. But it was Walter Babson whom the girls most discussed and in whom Una found the most interest.

On her first day in the office she had been startled by an astounding young man who had come flying past her desk, with his coat off, his figured waistcoat half open, his red four-in-hand tie askew under a rolling soft collar. He had dashed up to the office-manager and demanded, “Say! Say! Nat! Got that Kokomobile description copied for me yet? Heh? Gawd! you’re slow. Got a cigarette?” He went off, puffing out cigarette smoke, shaking his head and audibly muttering, “Slow bunch, werry.” He seemed to be of Una’s own age, or perhaps a year older—a slender young man with horn-rimmed eye-glasses, curly black hair, and a trickle of black mustache. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbow, and Una had a secret, shamed, shivering thrill in the contrast of the dead-white skin of his thin forearms with the long, thick, soft, black hairs matted over them. They seemed at once feminine and acidly male.

“Crazy idiot,” she observed, apparently describing herself and the nervous young man together. But she knew that she wanted to see him again.

She discovered that he was prone to such violent appearances; that his name was Walter Babson; that he was one of the three desk editors under the managing editor; that the stenographers and office-boys alternately disapproved of him, because he went on sprees and borrowed money from anybody in sight, and adored him because he was democratically frank with them. He was at once a hero, clown, prodigal son, and preacher of honesty. It was variously said that he was a socialist, an anarchist, and a believer in an American monarchy, which he was reported as declaring would “give some color to this flat-faced province of a country.” It was related that he had been “fresh” even to the owner, and had escaped discharge only by being the quickest worker in the office, the best handy man at turning motor statistics into lively news-stories. Una saw that he liked to stand about, bawling to the quizzical S. Herbert Ross that “this is a hell of a shop to work in—rotten pay and no esprit de corps. I’d quit and free-lance if I could break in with fiction, but a rotten bunch of log-rollers have got the inside track with all the magazines and book-publishers.”

“Ever try to write any fiction?” Una once heard S. Herbert retort.

“No, but Lord! any fool could write better stuff than they publish. It’s all a freeze-out game; editors just accept stuff by their friends.”

In one week Una heard Walter Babson make approximately the same assertions to three different men, and to whoever in the open office might care to listen and profit thereby. Then, apparently, he ceased to hear the call of literature, and he snorted at S. Herbert Ross’s stodgy assistant that he was a wage-slave, and a fool not to form a clerks’ union. In a week or two he was literary again. He dashed down to the office-manager, poked a sheet of copy-paper at him, and yelped: “Say, Nat. Read that and tell me just what you think of it. I’m going to put some literary flavor into the Gas-bag even if it does explode it. Look—see. I’ve taken a boost for the Kells Karburetor—rotten lying boost it is, too—and turned it into this running verse, read it like prose, pleasant and easy to digest, especially beneficial to children and S. Herbert Souse, Sherbert Souse, I mean.” He rapidly read an amazing lyric beginning, “Motorists, you hadn’t better monkey with the carburetor, all the racers, all the swells, have equipped their cars with Kells. We are privileged to announce what will give the trade a jounce, that the floats have been improved like all motorists would have loved.”

He broke off and shouted, “Punk last line, but I’ll fix it up. Say, that’ll get ’em all going, eh? Say, I bet the Kells people use it in bill-board ads. all over the country, and maybe sign my name. Ads., why say, it takes a literary guy to write ads., not a fat-headed commercialist like S. Charlie Hoss.”

Two days later Una heard Babson come out and lament that the managing editor didn’t like his masterpiece and was going to use the Kells Karburetor Kompany’s original write-up. “That’s what you get when you try to give the Gas-bag some literary flavor—don’t appreciate it!”

She would rather have despised him, except that he stopped by the office-boys’ bench to pull their hair and tell them to read English dictionaries. And when Miss Moynihan looked dejected, Babson demanded of her, “What’s trouble, girlie? Anybody I can lick for you? Glad to fire the owner, or anything. Haven’t met you yet, but my name is Roosevelt, and I’m the new janitor,” with a hundred other chuckling idiocies, till Miss Moynihan was happy again. Una warmed to his friendliness, like that of a tail-wagging little yellow pup.

And always she craved the touch of his dark, blunt, nervous hands. Whenever he lighted a cigarette she was startled by his masculine way of putting out the match and jerking it away from him in one abrupt motion.... She had never studied male mannerisms before. To Miss Golden of Panama men had always been “the boys.”

All this time Walter Babson had never spoken to her.

CHAPTER V

THE office-manager came casually up to Una’s desk and said, “You haven’t taken any dictation yet, have you?”

“No, but,” with urgent eagerness, “I’d like—I’m quite fast in stenography.”

“Well, Mr. Babson, in the editorial department, wants to give some dictation and you might try—”

Una was so excited that she called herself a silly little fool. She seized her untouched note-book, her pencils sharpened like lances, and tried to appear a very mouse of modesty as she marched down the office to take her first real dictation, to begin her triumphant career.... And to have Walter Babson, the beloved fool, speak to her.

It was a cold shock to have to stand waiting behind Babson while he rummaged in his roll-top desk and apparently tried to pull out his hair. He looked back at her and blurted, “Oh! You, Miss Golden? They said you’d take some dictation. Chase those blue-prints off that chair and sit down. Be ready in a sec.”

While she sat on the edge of the chair Babson yanked out drawers, plunged his wriggling hands into folders, thrashed through a pile of papers and letters that over-flowed a wire basket, and even hauled a dictionary down from the top of the desk and hopefully peered inside the front cover. All the time he kept up comment at which Una smiled doubtfully, not quite sure whether it was meant for her or not:

“Now what the doggone doggonishness did I ever do with those doggone notes, anyway? I ask you, in the— Here they— Nope—”

At last he found inside a book on motor fuels the wad of copy-paper on which he had scrawled notes with a broad, soft pencil, and he began to dictate a short article on air-cooling. Una was terrified lest she be unable to keep up, but she had read recent numbers of the Gazette thoroughly, she had practised the symbols for motor technologies, and she was not troubled by being watched. Indeed, Babson seemed to have enough to do in keeping his restless spirit from performing the dismaying feat of leaping straight out of his body. He leaned back in his revolving desk-chair with a complaining squawk from the spring, he closed his eyes, put his fingers together piously, then seized the chair-arms and held them, while he cocked one eye open and squinted at a large alarm-clock on the desk. He sighed profoundly, bent forward, gazed at his ankle, and reached forward to scratch it. All this time he was dictating, now rapidly, now gurgling and grunting while he paused to find a word.

“Don’t be so nervous!” Una wanted to scream at him, and she wanted to add, “You didn’t ask my permission!” when he absently fumbled in a cigarette-box.

She didn’t like Walter Babson, after all!

But he stopped after a rhapsody on the divine merits of an air-cooling system, clawed his billowing black hair, and sighed, “Sounds improbable, don’t it? Must be true, though; it’s going to appear in the Gazette, and that’s the motor-dealer’s bible. If you don’t believe it, read the blurbs we publish about ourselves!” Then he solemnly winked at her and went on dictating.

When he had finished he demanded, “Ever take any dictation in this office before?”

“No, sir.”

“Ever take any motor dictation at all?”

“No, sir.”

“Then you’d better read that back to me. Your immejit boss—the office-manager—is all right, but the secretary of the company is always pussy-footing around, and if you’re ever having any trouble with your stuff when old plush-ears is in sight, keep on typing fast, no matter what you put down. Now read me the dope.”

It was approximately correct. He nodded, and, “Good work, little girl,” he said. “You’ll get along all right. You get my dictation better than that agitated antelope Miss Harman does, right now. That’s all.”

§ 2

So far as anything connected with Walter Babson could be regular, Una became his regular stenographer, besides keeping up her copying. He was always rushing out, apologizing for troubling her, sitting on the edge of her desk, dictating a short letter, and advising her to try his latest brand of health food, which, this spring, was bran biscuits—probably combined with highballs and too much coffee. The other stenographers winked at him, and he teased them about their coiffures and imaginary sweethearts.... For three days the women’s coat-room boiled with giggles over Babson’s declaration that Miss MacThrostle was engaged to a burglar, and was taking a correspondence course in engraving in order to decorate her poor dear husband’s tools with birds and poetic mottoes.

Babson was less jocular with Una than with the bouncing girls who were natives of Harlem. But he smiled at her, as though they were understanding friends, and once he said, but quietly, rather respectfully, “You have nice hair—soft.” She lay awake to croon that to herself, though she denied that she was in love with this eccentric waster.

Always Babson kept up his ejaculations and fidgeting. He often accused himself of shiftlessness and begged her to make sure that he dictated certain matter before he escaped for the evening. “Come in and bother the life out of me. Come in every half-hour,” he would say. When she did come in he would crow and chuckle, “Nope. I refuse to be tempted yet; I am a busy man. But maybe I’ll give you those verbal jewels of great price on your next visitation, oh thou in the vocative—some Latin scholar, eh? Keep it up, kid; good work. Maybe you’ll keep me from being fired.”

Usually he gave her the dictation before he went. But not always. And once he disappeared for four days—on a drunk, everybody said, in excited office gossip.

During Babson’s desertion the managing editor called Una in and demanded, “Did Mr. Babson give you some copy about the Manning Wind Shield? No? Will you take a look in his desk for his notes about it?”

While Una was fumbling for the notes she did not expect to find, she went through all the agony of the little shawled foreign wife for the husband who has been arrested.

“I’ve got to help you!” she said to his desk, to his bag of Bull Durham, to his alarm-clock—even to a rather shocking collection of pictures of chorus-girls and diaphanously-clad dancers which was pasted inside the double drawer on the right side of the desk. In her great surge of emotion, she noticed these posturing hussies far less than she did a little volume of Rosetti, or the overshoes whose worn toes suddenly revealed to her that Walter Babson, the editor, was not rich—was not, perhaps, so very much better paid than herself.

She did not find the notes. She had to go to the managing editor, trembling, all her good little heart wild with pain. The editor’s brows made a V at her report, and he grunted, “Well—”

For two days, till Walter Babson returned, she never failed to look up when the outer door of the office opened.

She found herself immensely interested in trying to discover, from her low plane as copyist, just what sort of a position Walter Babson occupied up among the select souls. Nor was it very difficult. The editor’s stenographer may not appreciate all the subtleties of his wit, and the refinements of his manner may leave her cold, but she does hear things, she hears the Big Chief’s complaints.

Una discovered that the owner and the managing editor did not regard Walter Babson as a permanent prop of the institution; that they would keep him, at his present salary of twenty-five dollars a week, only till some one happened in who would do the same work for less money. His prose was clever but irregular; he wasn’t always to be depended upon for grammar; in everything he was unstable; yet the owner’s secretary reported the owner as saying that some day, if Babson married the right woman, he would “settle down and make good.”

Una did not dare to make private reservations regarding what “the right woman” ought to mean in this case, but she burned at the thought of Walter Babson’s marrying, and for an instant she saw quite clearly the film of soft dark hair that grew just below his sharp cheek-bone. But she forgot the sweetness of the vision in scorn of herself for even thinking of marriage with a weakling; scorn of herself for aspiring to marry a man who regarded her as only a dull stenographer; and a maternal anxiety over him that was untouched by passion.

Babson returned to the office, immaculate, a thin, fiery soul. But he was closeted with the secretary of the company for an hour, and when he came out his step was slow. He called for Una and dictated articles in a quiet voice, with no jesting. His hand was unsteady, he smoked cigarettes constantly, and his eye was an unwholesome yellow.

She said to him suddenly, a few days later, “Mr. Babson, I’d be glad if I could take care of any papers or anything for you.”

“Thanks. You might stick these chassis sketches away some place right now.”

So she was given the chance to keep his desk straight. He turned to her for everything.

He said to her, abruptly, one dreary late afternoon of April when she felt immensely languid and unambitious: “You’re going to succeed—unless you marry some dub. But there’s one rule for success—mind you, I don’t follow it myself, I can’t, but it’s a grand old hunch: ‘If you want to get on, always be ready to occupy the job just ahead of you.’ Only—what the devil is the job just ahead of a stenog.? I’ve been thinking of you and wondering. What is it?”

“Honestly, Mr. Babson, I don’t know. Here, anyway. Unless it’s lieutenant of the girls.”

“Well—oh, that’s just miffle-business, that kind of a job. Well, you’d better learn to express yourself, anyway. Some time you women folks will come into your own with both feet. Whenever you get the chance, take my notes and try to write a better spiel from them than I do.... That won’t be hard, I guess!”

“I don’t know why you are so modest, Mr. Babson. Every girl in the office thinks you write better than any of the other editors.”

“Yuh—but they don’t know. They think that just because I chuck’em under the chin. I can’t do this technical stuff.... Oh, Lord! what an evening it’ll be!... I suppose I’ll go to a show. Nice, lonely city, what?... You come from here?”

“From Pennsylvania.”

“Got any folks?”

“My mother is here with me.”

“That’s nice. I’ll take her and you to some bum two-bit vaudeville show some night, if you’d like.... Got to show my gratitude to you for standing my general slovenliness.... Lord! nice evening—dine at a rôtisserie with a newspaper for companion. Well—g’ night and g’ luck.”

Una surprised her mother, when they were vivisecting the weather after dinner, by suddenly crying all over the sofa cushions.

She knew all of Walter Babson’s life from those two or three sentences of his.

§ 3

François Villons America has a-plenty. An astonishing number of Americans with the literary itch do contrive to make a living out of that affliction. They write motion-picture scenarios and fiction for the magazines that still regard detective stories as the zenith of original art. They gather in woman-scented flats to discuss sex, or in hard-voiced groups to play poker. They seem to find in the creation of literature very little besides a way of evading regular office hours. Below this stratum of people so successful that one sometimes sees their names in print is the yearning band of young men who want to write. Just to write—not to write anything in particular; not to express any definite thought, but to be literary, to be Bohemian, to dance with slim young authoresses of easy morals, and be jolly dogs and free souls. Some of them are dramatists with unacted dramas; some of them do free verse which is just as free as the productions of regular licensed poets. Some of them do short stories—striking, rather biological, very destructive of conventions. Some of them are ever so handy at all forms; they are perennial candidates for any job as book-reviewer, dramatic critic, or manuscript-reader, since they have the naïve belief that these occupations require neither toil nor training, and enable one to “write on the side.” Meanwhile they make their livings as sub-editors on trade journals, as charity-workers, or as assistants to illiterate literary agents.

To this slum of literature Walter Babson belonged. He felt that he was an author, though none of his poetry had ever been accepted, and though he had never got beyond the first chapter of any of his novels, nor the first act of any of his plays (which concerned authors who roughly resembled Walter Babson).

He was distinguished from his fellows by the fact that each year he grew more aware that he hadn’t even a dim candle of talent; that he was ill-planned and unpurposed; that he would have to settle down to the ordinary gray limbo of jobs and offices—as soon as he could get control of his chaotic desires. Literally, he hated himself at times; hated his own egotism, his treacherous appetite for drink and women and sloth, his imitative attempts at literature. But no one knew how bitterly he despised himself, in lonely walks in the rain, in savage pacing about his furnished room. To others he seemed vigorously conceited, cock-sure, noisily ready to blame the world for his own failures.

Walter Babson was born in Kansas. His father was a farmer and horse-doctor, a heavy drinker, an eccentric who joined every radical political movement. In a country school, just such a one as Una had taught, then in high school in a near-by town, Walter had won all the prizes for essays and debating, and had learned a good deal about Shakespeare and Cæsar and George Washington. Also he had learned a good deal about drinking beer, smoking manfully, and tempting the giggling girls who hung about the “deepot.” He ran away from high school, and in the most glorious years of his life worked his way down the Mississippi and up the Rio Grande, up to Alaska and down to Costa Rica, a butt and jester for hoboes, sailors, longshoremen, miners, cow-punchers, lunch-room owners, and proprietors of small newspapers. He learned to stick type and run a press. He returned to Kansas and worked on a country newspaper, studying poetry and college-entrance requirements in the evening. He had, at this time, the not entirely novel idea that “he ought to be able to make a lot of good fiction out of all his experiences.” Actually, he had no experiences, because he had no instinct for beauty. The proof is that he read quite solemnly and reverently a vile little periodical for would-be authors, which reduced authorship to a way of earning one’s living by supplying editors with cheap but ingenious items to fill space. It put literature on a level with keeping a five-and-ten-cent store. But Walter conned its pompous trade journal discussions as to whether the name and address of the author should be typed on the left or the right side of the first page of a manuscript; its lively little symposia, by such successful market-gardeners of literature as Mamie Stuyvesant Blupp and Bill Brown and Dr. J. F. Fitzneff, on the inspiring subject of whether it paid better to do filler verse for cheap magazines, or long verse for the big magazines. At the end, this almost madly idealistic journal gave a list of wants of editors; the editor of Lingerie and Laughter wanted “short, snappy stuff with a kick in it; especially good yarns about models, grisettes, etc.” Wanderlust was in the market for “stories with a punch that appealed to every red-blooded American; nothing about psychology, problems, Europe, or love wanted.” The Plymouth Rock Fancier announced that it could use “a good, lively rural poem every week; must be clean and original.”

Pathos there was in all of this; the infinitely little men and women daring to buy and sell “short, snappy stuff” in this somber and terribly beautiful world of Balzac and Wells and Turgenieff. And pathos there was in that wasted year when Walter Babson sought to climb from the gossiping little prairie town to the grandeur of great capitals by learning to be an efficient manufacturer of “good, lively rural poems.” He neglected even his college-entrance books, the Ruskin whose clots of gilt might have trained him to look for real gold, and the stilted Burke who might have given him a vision of empires and races and social destinies. And for his pathetic treachery he wasn’t even rewarded. His club-footed verses were always returned with printed rejection slips.

When at last he barely slid into Jonathan Edwards College, Iowa, Walter was already becoming discouraged; already getting the habit of blaming the gods, capitalists, editors, his father, the owner of the country newspaper on which he had been working, for everything that went wrong. He yammered destructive theories which would have been as obnoxious to a genuine fighting revolutionist as they were sacrilegious to his hard-fisted, earnest, rustic classmates in Jonathan Edwards. For Walter was not protesting against social injustice. The slavery of rubber-gatherers in the Putumayo and of sweatshop-workers in New York did not exist for him. He was protesting because, at the age of twenty, his name was not appearing in large flattering capitals on the covers of magazines.

Yet he was rather amusing; he helped plodding classmates with their assignments, and he was an active participant in all worthy movements to raise hell—as they admirably described it. By the end of his Freshman year he had given up all attempts to be a poet and to extract nourishment from the college classes, which were as hard and unpalatable as dried codfish. He got drunk, he vented his energy in noisy meetings with itinerant filles de joie, who were as provincial and rustic, as bewildered and unfortunate as the wild country boys, who in them found their only outlet for youth’s madness. Walter was abruptly expelled from college by the one man in the college whom he respected—the saintly president, who had dreams of a new Harvard on the prairies.

So Walter Babson found himself at twenty-one an outcast. He declaimed—though no one would believe him—that all the gentle souls he had ever encountered were weak; all the virile souls vicious or suspicious.

He drifted. He doubted himself, and all the more noisily asserted his talent and the injustice of the world. He looked clean and energetic and desirous, but he had nothing on which to focus. He became an active but careless reporter on newspapers in Wichita, Des Moines, Kansas City, St. Louis, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco. Between times he sold real-estate and insurance and sets of travel books, for he had no pride of journalism; he wanted to keep going and keep interested and make money and spend it; he wanted to express himself without trying to find out what his self was.

It must be understood that, for all his vices, Walter was essentially clean and kindly. He rushed into everything, the bad with the good. He was not rotten with heavy hopelessness; though he was an outcast from his home, he was never a pariah. Not Walter, but the smug, devilish cities which took their revenues from saloon-keeping were to blame when he turned from the intolerable dullness of their streets to the excitement of alcohol in the saloons and brothels which they made so much more amusing than their churches and parlors.

Everywhere in the Western newspaper circles Walter heard stories of Californians who had gone East and become geniuses the minute they crossed the Hudson.... Walter also went East and crossed the Hudson, but he did not become a genius. If there had been an attic to starve in, he would have starved in one, but as New York has nothing so picturesque, he starved in furnished rooms instead, while he wrote “special stories” for Sunday newspapers, and collected jokes for a syndicated humorous column. He was glad to become managing editor (though he himself was the only editor he had to manage) of a magazine for stamp-collectors. He wrote some advertisements for a Broadway dealer in automobile accessories, read half a dozen books on motors, and brazenly demanded his present position on the Motor and Gas Gazette.

He was as far from the rarified air of Bohemia (he really believed that sort of thing) as he had been in Kansas, except that he knew one man who made five thousand dollars a year by writing stories about lumberjacks, miners, cow-punchers, and young ladies of quite astounding courage. He was twenty-seven years old when he met Una Golden. He still read Omar Khayyam. He had a vague plan of going into real estate. There ought, he felt, to be money in writing real-estate advertisements.

He kept falling in love with stenographers and waitresses, with actresses whom he never met. He was never satisfied. He didn’t at all know what he wanted, but he wanted something stronger than himself.

He was desperately lonely—a humorous figure who had dared to aspire beyond the manure-piles of his father’s farm; therefore a young man to be ridiculed. And in his tragic loneliness he waited for the day when he should find any love, any labor, that should want him enough to seek him and demand that he sacrifice himself.

§ 4

It was Una’s first city spring.

Save in the squares, where the bourgeoning trees made green-lighted spaces for noon-time lovers, there was no change; no blossomy stir in asphalt and cement and brick and steel. Yet everything was changed. Between the cornices twenty stories above the pavement you could see a slit of softer sky, and there was a peculiar radiance in just the light itself, whether it lay along the park turf or made its way down an air-well to rest on a stolid wall of yellow brick. The river breeze, flowing so persuasively through streets which had been stormed by dusty gales, bore happiness. Grind-organs made music for ragged, dancing children, and old brick buildings smelled warm. Peanut-wagons came out with a long, shrill whine, locusts of the spring.

In the office even the most hustling of the great ones became human. They talked of suburban gardens and of motoring out to country clubs for tennis. They smiled more readily, and shamelessly said, “I certainly got the spring fever for fair to-day”; and twice did S. Herbert Ross go off to play golf all afternoon. The stenographer who commuted—always there is one girl in the office who commutes—brought spring in the form of pussy-willows and apple-blossoms, and was noisily envied.

The windows were open now, and usually some one was speculatively looking down to the life on the pavement, eight stories below. At noon-hour the younger girls of the office strolled along the sidewalk in threes and fours, bareheaded, their arms about one another, their spring-time lane an irregular course between boxes in front of loft-buildings; or they ate their box-and-paper-napkin lunches on the fire-escape that wound down into the court. They gigglingly drew their skirts about their ankles and flirted with young porters and packers who leaned from windows across the court. Una sat with them and wished that she could flirt like the daughters of New York. She listened eagerly to their talk of gathering violets in Van Cortlandt Park and tramping on the Palisades. She noted an increased number of excited confidences to the effect that, “He says to me—” and “I says to him—” and, “Say, gee! honest, Tess, he’s a swell fellow.” She caught herself wanting to tramp the Palisades with—with the Walter Babson who didn’t even know her first name.

When she left the flat these mornings she forgot her lonely mother instantly in the treacherous magic of the tender sky, and wanted to run away, to steal the blue and silver day for her own. But it was gone when she reached the office—no silver and blue day was here; but, on golden-oak desk and oak-and-frosted-glass semi-partitions, the same light as in the winter. Sometimes, if she got out early, a stilly afterglow of amber and turquoise brought back the spring. But all day long she merely saw signs that otherwhere, for other people, spring did exist; and she wistfully trusted in it as she watched and helped Walter Babson.

She was conscious that she was working more intimately with him as a comrade now, not as clerk with executive. There had been no one illuminating moment of understanding; he was impersonal with her; but each day their relationship was less of a mechanical routine, more of a personal friendship. She felt that he really depended on her steady carefulness; she knew that through the wild tangle of his impulsiveness she saw a desire to be noble.

§ 5

He came clattering down the aisle of desks to her one May afternoon, and begged, “Say, Miss Golden, I’m stuck. I got to get out some publicity on the Governor’s good-roads article we’re going to publish; want to send it out to forty papers in advance, and I can’t get only a dozen proofs. And it’s got to go off to-night. Can you make me some copies? You can use onion-skin paper and carbon’em and make anyway five copies at a whack. But prob’ly you’d have to stay late. Got anything on to-night? Could you do it? Could you do it? Could you?”

“Surely.”

“Well, here’s the stuff. Just single-space that introductory spiel at the top, will you?”

Una rudely turned out of her typewriter a form-letter which she was writing for S. Herbert Ross, and began to type Walter’s publicity, her shoulders bent, her eyes intent, oblivious to the steady stream of gossip which flowed from stenographer to stenographer, no matter how busy they were. He needed her! She would have stayed till midnight. While the keys burred under her fingers she was unconsciously telling herself a story of how she would be working half the night, with the office still and shadowy, of how a dead-white face would peer through the window near her desk (difficult of accomplishment, as the window was eight stories up in air), of how she was to be pursued by a man on the way home; and how, when she got there, her mother would say, “I just don’t see how you could neglect me like this all evening.” All the while she felt herself in touch with large affairs—an article by the Governor of the State; these very sheets that she was typing to go to famous newspapers, to the “thundering presses” of which she had read in fiction; urgency, affairs, and—doing something for Walter Babson.

She was still typing swiftly at five-thirty, the closing hour. The article was long; she had at least two hours of work ahead. Miss Moynihan came stockily to say good-night. The other stenographers fluttered out to the elevators. Their corner became oppressively quiet. The office-manager gently puttered about, bade her good-night, drifted away. S. Herbert Ross boomed out of his office, explaining the theory of advertising to a gasoleny man in a pin-checked suit as they waddled to the elevator. The telephone-girl hurried back to connect up a last call, frowned while she waited, yanked out the plug, and scuttled away—a creamy, roe-eyed girl, pretty and unhappy at her harassing job of connecting nervous talkers all day. Four men, editors and advertising-men, shouldered out, bawling over a rather feeble joke about Bill’s desire for a drink and their willingness to help him slay the booze-evil. Una was conscious that they had gone, that walls of silence were closing about her clacking typewriter. And that Walter Babson had not gone; that he was sharing with her this whispering forsaken office.

Presently he came rambling out of the editorial-room.

He had taken off his grotesque, great horn-rimmed glasses. His eyes were mutinous in his dark melancholy face; he drew a hand over them and shook his head. Una was aware of all this in one glance. “Poor, tired boy!” she thought.

He sat on the top of the nearest desk, hugged his knee, rocked back and forth, and said, “Much left, Miss Golden?”

“I think I’ll be through in about two hours.”

“Oh, Lord! I can’t let you stay that late.”

“It doesn’t matter. Really! I’ll be glad. I haven’t had to stay late much.”

For quite the first time he stared straight at her, saw her as a human being. She was desperately hoping that her hair was smooth and that there wasn’t any blue from the typewriter ribbon daubed on her cheeks!... He ceased his rocking; appraised her. A part of her brain was wondering what he would do; a part longing to smile temptingly at him; a part coldly commanding, “You will not be a little fool—he isn’t interested in you, and you won’t try to make him be, either!”

“Why, you look as fagged as I feel,” he said. “I suppose I’m as bad as the rest. I kick like a steer when the Old Man shoves some extra work on me, and then I pass the buck and make you stay late. Say! Tell you what we’ll do.” Very sweet to her was his “we,” and his intimacy of tone. “I’ll start copying, too. I’m quite considerable at machine-pounding myself, and we can get the thing done and mailed by six-thirty or so, and then I’ll buy you a handsome dinner at Childs’s. Gosh! I’ll even blow you to a piece of pie; and I’ll shoot you up home by quarter to eight. Great stuff! Gimme a copy of the drool. Meanwhile you’ll have a whole hour for worried maiden thoughts over going out to eat with the bad, crazy Wally Babson!”

His smile was a caress. Her breath caught, she smiled back at him fearfully. Then he was gone. In the editorial office was heard the banging of his heavy old typewriter—it was an office joke, Walter’s hammering of the “threshing-machine.”

She began to type again, with mechanical rapidity, not consciously seeing the copy, so distraught was she as she murmured, “Oh, I oughtn’t to go out with him.... But I will!... What nonsense! Why shouldn’t I have dinner with him.... Oh, I mustn’t—I’m a typist and he’s a boss.... But I will!”

Glancing down the quiet stretches of the office, to the windows looking to westward, she saw that the sky was a delicate primrose. In a loft-building rearing out of the low structures between her and the North River, lights were springing out, and she—who ought to have known that they marked weary, late-staying people like herself, fancied that they were the lights of restaurants for gay lovers. She dismissed her problem, forgot the mother who was waiting with a demand for all of Una’s youth, and settled down to a happy excitement in the prospect of going out with Walter; of knowing him, of feeling again that smile.

He came prancing out with his copies of the article before she had finished. “Some copyist, eh?” he cried. “Say, hustle and finish. Gee! I’ve been smoking cigarettes to-day till my mouth tastes like a fish-market. Want to eat and forget my troubles.”

With her excitement dulled to a matter-of-fact hungriness, she trotted beside him to a restaurant, one of the string of Vance eating-places, a food-mill which tried to achieve originality by the use of imitation rafters, a plate-rack aligned with landscape plates, and varnished black tables for four instead of the long, marble tables which crowded the patrons together in most places of the sort. Walter verbosely called her attention to the mottoes painted on the wood, the individual table lights in pink shades. “Just forget the eats, Miss Golden, and you can imagine you’re in a regular restaurant. Gosh! this place ought to reconcile you to dining with the crazy Babson. I can’t imagine a liaison in a place where coffee costs five cents.”

He sounded boisterous, but he took her coat so languidly, he slid so loosely into his chair, that she burned with desire to soothe away his office weariness. She forgot all reserve. She burst out: “Why do you call yourself ‘crazy’? Just because you have more energy than anybody else in the office?”

“No,” he said, grimly, snatching at the menu, “because I haven’t any purpose in the scheme of things.”

Una told herself that she was pleased to see how the scrawny waitress purred at Walter when he gave his order. Actually she was feeling resentfully that no saw-voiced, galumphing Amazon of a waitress could appreciate Walter’s smile.

In a Vance eating-place, ordering a dinner, and getting approximately what you order, is not a delicate epicurean art, but a matter of business, and not till an enormous platter of “Vance’s Special Ham and Eggs, Country Style,” was slammed down between them, and catsup, Worcestershire sauce, napkins, more rolls, water, and another fork severally demanded of the darting waitress, did Walter seem to remember that this was a romantic dinner with a strange girl, not a deal in food-supplies.

His wavering black eyes searched her face. She was agitatedly aware that her skin was broken out in a small red spot beside her lips; but she hoped that he would find her forehead clear, her mouth a flower. He suddenly nodded, as though he had grown used to her and found her comfortable. While his wreathing hands picked fantastically at a roll and made crosses with lumps of sugar, his questions probed at that hidden soul which she herself had never found. It was the first time that any one had demanded her formula of life, and in her struggle to express herself she rose into a frankness which Panama circles of courtship did not regard as proper to young women.

“What’s your ambition?” he blurted. “Going to just plug along and not get anywhere?”

“No, I’m not; but it’s hard. Women aren’t trusted in business, and you can’t count without responsibility. All I can do is keep looking.”

“Go out for suffrage, feminism, so on?”

“I don’t know anything about them. Most women don’t know anything about them—about anything!”

“Huh! Most people don’t! Wouldn’t have office-grinding if people did know anything.... How much training have you had?”

“Oh, public school, high school, commercial college.”

“Where?”

“Panama, Pennsylvania.”

“I know. About like my own school in Kansas—the high-school principal would have been an undertaker if he’d had more capital.... Gee! principal and capital—might make a real cunning pun out of that if I worked over it a little. I know.... Go to church?”

“Why—why, yes, of course.”

“Which god do you favor at present—Unitarian or Catholic or Christian Science or Seventh-Day Advent?”

“Why, it’s the same—”

“Now don’t spring that ‘it’s the same God’ stuff on me. It isn’t the same God that simply hones for candles and music in an Episcopal Church and gives the Plymouth Brotherhood a private copyright revelation that organs and candles are wicked.”

“You’re terribly sacrilegious.”

“You don’t believe any such thing. Or else you’d lam me—same as they used to do in the crusades. You don’t really care a hang.”

“No, I really don’t care!” she was amazed to hear herself admit.

“Of course, I’m terribly crude and vulgar, but then what else can you be in dealing with a bunch of churches that haven’t half the size or beauty of farmers’ red barns? And yet the dubs go on asserting that they believe the church is God’s house. If I were God, I’d sure object to being worse housed than the cattle. But, gosh! let’s pass that up. If I started in on what I think of almost anything—churches or schools, or this lying advertising game—I’d yelp all night, and you could always answer me that I’m merely a neurotic failure, while the big guns that I jump on own motor-cars.” He stopped his rapid tirade, chucked a lump of sugar at an interrogative cat which was making the round of the tables, scowled, and suddenly fired at her:

“What do you think of me?”

“You’re the kindest person I ever met.”

“Huh? Kind? Good to my mother?”

“Perhaps. You’ve made the office happy for me. I really admire you.... I s’pose I’m terribly unladylike to tell you.”

“Gee whiz!” he marveled. “Got an admirer! And I always thought you were an uncommonly level-headed girl. Shows how you can fool’em.”

He smiled at her, directly, rather forlornly, proud of her praise.

Regardless of other tables, he thrust his arm across, and with the side of his hand touched the side of hers for a second. Dejectedly he said: “But why do you like me? I’ve good intentions; I’m willing to pinch Tolstoi’s laurels right off his grave, and orate like William Jennings Bryan. And there’s a million yearners like me. There ain’t a hall-bedroom boy in New York that wouldn’t like to be a genius.”

“I like you because you have fire. Mr. Babson, do you—”

“Walter!”

“How premature you are!”

“Walter!”

“You’ll be calling me ‘Una’ next, and think how shocked the girls will be.”

“Oh no. I’ve quite decided to call you ‘Goldie.’ Sounds nice and sentimental. But for heaven’s sake go on telling me why you like me. That isn’t a hackneyed subject.”

“Oh, I’ve never known anybody with fire, except maybe S. Herbert Ross, and he—he—”

“He blobs around.”

“Yes, something like that. I don’t know whether you are ever going to do anything with your fire, but you do have it, Mr. Babson!”

“I’ll probably get fired with it.... Say, do you read Omar?”

In nothing do the inarticulate “million hall-room boys who want to be geniuses,” the ordinary, unshaved, not over-bathed, ungrammatical young men of any American city, so nearly transcend provincialism as in an enthusiasm over their favorite minor cynic, Elbert Hubbard or John Kendrick Bangs, or, in Walter Babson’s case, Mr. Fitzgerald’s variations on Omar. Una had read Omar as a pretty poem about roses and murmurous courts, but read him she had; and such was Walter’s delight in that fact that he immediately endowed her with his own ability to enjoy cynicism. He jabbed at the menu with a fork and glowed and shouted, “Say, isn’t it great, that quatrain about ‘Take the cash and let the credit go’?”

While Una beamed and enjoyed her boy’s youthful enthusiasm. Mother of the race, ancient tribal woman, medieval chatelaine, she was just now; kin to all the women who, in any age, have clapped their hands to their men’s boasting.

She agreed with him that “All these guys that pride themselves on being gentlemen—like in English novels—are jus’ the same as the dubs you see in ordinary life.”

And that it was not too severe an indictment to refer to the advertising-manager as “S. Herbert Louse.”

And that “the woman feeding by herself over at that corner table looks mysterious, somehow. Gee! there must be a tragedy in her life.”

But her gratification in being admitted to his enthusiasms was only a background for her flare when he boldly caught up her white paw and muttered, “Tired little hand that has to work so hard!”

She couldn’t move; she was afraid to look at him. Clattering restaurant and smell of roast pork and people about her all dissolved in her agitation. She shook her head violently to awaken herself, heard herself say, calmly, “It’s terribly late. Don’t you think it is?” and knew that she was arising. But she moved beside him down the street in languor, wondering in every cell of her etherealized body whether he would touch her hand again; what he would do. Not till they neared the Subway station did she, woman, the protector, noting his slow step and dragging voice, rouse herself to say, “Oh, don’t come up in the Subway; I’m used to it, really!”

“My dear Goldie, you aren’t used to anything in real life. Gee! I said that snappily, and it don’t mean a thing!” he gleefully pointed out. He seized her arm, which prickled to the touch of his fingers, rushed her down the Subway steps, and while he bought their tickets they smiled at each other.

Several times on the way up he told her that it was a pleasure to have some one who could “appreciate his honest-t’-God opinions of the managing editor and S. Herbert Frost.”

The Subway, plunging through unvaried darkness, levitated them from the district of dark loft-buildings and theater-bound taxicabs to a far-out Broadway, softened with trees and brightened with small apartment-houses and little shops. They could see a great feathery space of vernal darkness down over the Hudson at the end of a street. Steel-bound nature seemed reaching for them wherever in a vacant lot she could get free and send out quickening odors of fresh garden soil.

“Almost country,” said Walter.

An urgent, daring look came into his eyes, under the light-cluster. He stopped, took her arm. There was an edge of spring madness in his voice as he demanded, “Wouldn’t you like to run away with me to-night? Feel this breeze on your lips—it’s simply plumb-full of mystery. Wouldn’t you like to run away? and we’d tramp the Palisades till dawn and go to sleep with the May sun glaring down the Hudson. Wouldn’t you like to, wouldn’t you?”

She was conscious that, though his head was passionately thrown back, his faunlike eyes stared into hers, and that his thin lips arched. Terribly she wanted to say, “Yes!” Actually, Una Golden of Panama and the Gazette office speculated, for a tenth of a second, whether she couldn’t go. Madness—river-flow and darkness and the stars! But she said, “No, I’m afraid we couldn’t possibly!”

“No,” he said, slowly. “Of course—of course I didn’t mean we could; but—Goldie, little Goldie that wants to live and rule things, wouldn’t you like to go? Wouldn’t you?”

“Yes!... You hurt my arm so!... Oh, don’t! We must—”

Her low cry was an appeal to him to save them from spring’s scornful, lusty demand; every throbbing nerve in her seemed to appeal to him; and it was not relief, but gratitude, that she felt when he said, tenderly, “Poor kid!... Which way? Come.” They walked soberly toward the Golden flat, and soberly he mused, “Poor kids, both of us trying to be good slaves in an office when we want to smash things.... You’ll be a queen—you’ll grab the throne same as you grab papers offn my desk. And maybe you’ll let me be court jester.”

“Why do you say I’ll—oh, be a queen? Do you mean literally, in business, an executive?”

“Hadn’t thought just what it did imply, but I suppose it’s that.”

“But why, why? I’m simply one of a million stenographers.”

“Oh, well, you aren’t satisfied to take things just as they’re handed to you. Most people are, and they stick in a rut and wonder who put them there. All this success business is a mystery—listen to how successful men trip themselves up and fall all over their foolish faces when they try to explain to a bunch of nice, clean, young clerks how they stole their success. But I know you’ll get it, because you aren’t satisfied easily—you take my work and do it. And yet you’re willing to work in one corner till it’s time to jump. That’s my failing—I ain’t willing to stick.”

“I—perhaps—— Here’s the flat.”

“Lord!” he cried; “we got to walk a block farther and back.”

“Well—”

They were stealing onward toward the breeze from the river before she had finished her “Well.”

“Think of wasting this hypnotizing evening talking of success—word that means a big house in Yonkers! When we’ve become friends, Goldie, little Goldie. Business of souls grabbing for each other! Friends—at least to-night! Haven’t we, dear? haven’t we?”

“Oh, I hope so!” she whispered.

He drew her hand into his pocket and clasped it there. She looked shyly down. Strange that her hand should not be visible when she could feel its palm flame against his. She let it snuggle there, secure.... Mr. Walter Babson was not a young man with “bad prospects,” or “good prospects”; he was love incarnate in magic warm flesh, and his hand was the hand of love. She was conscious of his hard-starched cuff pressing against her bare arm—a man’s cuff under the rough surface of his man’s coat-sleeve.

He brought her back to the vestibule of the flat. For a moment he held both her arms at the elbow and looked at her, while with a panic fear she wondered why she could not move—wondered if he were going to kiss her.

He withdrew his hands, sighed, “Good-night, Goldie. I won’t be lonely to-night!” and turned abruptly away.

Through all of Mrs. Golden’s long, sobbing queries as to why Una had left her alone all evening Una was patient. For she knew that she had ahead of her a quiet moment when she would stand alone with the god of love and pray to him to keep her boy, her mad boy, Walter.

While she heard her voice crisply explaining, “Why, you see, mother dear, I simply had to get some work done for the office—” Una was telling herself, “Some day he will kiss me, and I’m not sorry he didn’t to-night—not now any more I’m not.... It’s so strange—I like to have him touch me, and I simply never could stand other men touching me!... I wonder if he’s excited now, too? I wonder what he’s doing.... Oh, I’m glad, glad I loved his hands!”

CHAPTER VI

I NEVER thought a nice girl could be in love with a man who is bad, and I s’pose Walter is bad. Kind of. But maybe he’ll become good.”

So Una simple-heartedly reflected on her way to the Subway next morning. She could not picture what he would do, now that it was hard, dry day again, and all the world panted through dusty streets. And she recklessly didn’t care. For Walter was not hard and dry and dusty; and she was going to see him again! Sometimes she was timorous about seeing him, because he had read the longing in her face, had known her soul with its garments thrown away. But, timorous or not, she had to see him; she would never let him go, now that he had made her care for him.

Walter was not in sight when she entered the offices, and she was instantly swept into the routine. Not clasping hands beguiled her, but lists to copy, typing errors to erase, and the irritating adjustment of a shift-key which fiendishly kept falling. For two hours she did not see him.

About ten-thirty she was aware that he was prosaically strolling toward her.

Hundreds of times, in secret maiden speculations about love, the girl Una had surmised that it would be embarrassing to meet a man the morning after you had yielded to his caress. It had been perplexing—one of those mysteries of love over which virgins brood between chapters of novels, of which they diffidently whisper to other girls when young married friends are amazingly going to have a baby. But she found it natural to smile up at Walter.... In this varnished, daytime office neither of them admitted their madness of meeting hands.

He merely stooped over her desk and said, sketchily, “Mornin’, little Goldie.”

Then for hours he seemed to avoid her. She was afraid. Most of all, afraid of her own desire to go to him and wail that he was avoiding her.

At three o’clock, when the office tribe accept with naïve gratitude any excuse to talk, to stop and tell one another a new joke, to rush to the window and critically view a parade, Una saw that Walter was beginning to hover near her. She was angry that he did not come straight to her. He did not seem quite to know whether he wanted her or not. But her face was calm above her typing while she watched him peer at her over the shoulder of S. Herbert Ross, to whom he was talking. He drew nearer to her. He examined a poster. She was oblivious of him. She was conscious that he was trying to find an excuse to say something without openly admitting to the ever-spying row of stenographers that he was interested in her. He wambled up to her at last and asked for a letter she had filed for him. She knew from the casual-looking drop of his eyes that he was peering at the triangle of her clear-skinned throat, and for his peeping uneasiness she rather despised him. She could fancy herself shouting at him, “Oh, stop fidgeting! Make up your mind whether you like me or not, and hurry up about it. I don’t care now.”

In which secret defiance she was able to luxuriate—since he was still in the office, not gone from her forever!—till five o’clock, when the detached young men of offices are wont to face another evening of lonely irrelevancy, and desperately begin to reach for companionship.

At that hour Walter rushed up and begged, “Goldie, you must come out with me this evening.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s so late—”

“Oh, I know. Gee! if you knew how I’ve been thinking about you all day! I’ve been wondering if I ought to— I’m no good; blooming waster, I told myself; and I wondered if I had any right to try to make you care; but— Oh, you must come, Goldie!”

Una’s pride steeled her. A woman can forgive any vice of man more readily than she can forgive his not loving her so unhesitatingly that he will demand her without stopping to think of his vices. Refusal to sacrifice the beloved is not a virtue in youth.

Una said, clearly, “I am sorry, but I can’t possibly this evening.”

“Well—wish you could,” he sighed.

As he moved away Una reveled in having refused his half-hearted invitation, but already she was aware that she would regret it. She was shaken with woman’s fiercely possessive clinging to love.

The light on one side of her desk was shut off by the bulky presence of Miss Moynihan. She whispered, huskily, “Say, Miss Golden, you want to watch out for that Babson fellow. He acts like he was stuck on you. Say, listen; everybody says he’s a bad one. Say, listen, honest; they say he’d compromise a lady jus’ soon as not.”

“Why, I don’t know what you mean.”

“Oh no, like fun you don’t—him rubbering at you all day and pussy-footing around!”

“Why, you’re perfectly crazy! He was merely asking me about some papers—”

“Oh yes, sure! Lemme tell you, a lady can’t be none too careful about her reputation with one of them skinny, dark devils like a Dago snooping around.”

“Why, you’re absolutely ridiculous! Besides, how do you know Mr. Babson is bad? Has he ever hurt anybody in the office?”

“No, but they say—”

“’They say’!”

“Now don’t you go and get peeved after you and me been such good friends, Miss Golden. I don’t know that this Babson fellow ever done anything worse than eat cracker-jack at South Beach, but I was just telling you what they all say—how he drinks and goes with a lot of totties and all; but—but he’s all right if you say so, and—honest t’ Gawd, Miss Golden, listen, honest, I wouldn’t knock him for nothing if I thought he was your fellow! And,” in admiration, “and him an editor! Gee!”

Una tried to see herself as a princess forgiving her honest servitor. But, as a matter of fact, she was plain angry that her romance should be dragged into the nastiness of office gossip. She resented being a stenographer, one who couldn’t withdraw into a place for dreams. And she fierily defended Walter in her mind; throbbed with a big, sweet pity for her nervous, aspiring boy whose quest for splendor made him seem wild to the fools about them.

When, just at five-thirty, Walter charged up to her again, she met him with a smile of unrestrained intimacy.

“If you’re going to be home at all this evening, let me come up just for fifteen minutes!” he demanded.

“Yes!” she said, breathlessly. “Oh, I oughtn’t to, but—come up at nine.”

§ 2

Una had always mechanically liked children; had ejaculated, “Oh, the pink little darling!” over each neighborhood infant; had pictured children of her own; but never till that night had the desire to feel her own baby’s head against her breast been a passion. After dinner she sat on the stoop of her apartment-house, watching the children at play between motors on the street.

“Oh, it would be wonderful to have a baby—a boy like Walter must have been—to nurse and pet and cry over!” she declared, as she watched a baby of faint, brown ringlets—hair that would be black like Walter’s. Later she chided herself for being so bold, so un-Panamanian; but she was proud to know that she could long for the pressure of a baby’s lips. The brick-walled street echoed with jagged cries of children; tired women in mussed waists poked their red, steamy necks out of windows; the sky was a blur of gray; and, lest she forget the job, Una’s left wrist ached from typing; yet she heard the rustle of spring, and her spirit swelled with thankfulness as she felt her life to be not a haphazard series of days, but a divine progress.

Walter was coming—to-night!

She was conscious of her mother, up-stairs. From her place of meditation she had to crawl up the many steps to the flat and answer at least twenty questions as to what she had been doing. Of Walter’s coming she could say nothing; she could not admit her interest in a man she did not know.

At a quarter to nine she ventured to say, ever so casually: “I feel sort of headachy. I think I’ll run down and sit on the steps again and get a little fresh air.”

“Let’s have a little walk. I’d like some fresh air, too,” said Mrs. Golden, brightly.

“Why—oh—to tell the truth, I wanted to think over some office business.”

“Oh, of course, my dear, if I am in the way—!” Mrs. Golden sighed, and trailed pitifully off into the bedroom.

Una followed her, and wanted to comfort her. But she could say nothing, because she was palpitating over Walter’s coming. The fifteen minutes of his stay might hold any splendor.

She could not change her clothes. Her mother was in the bedroom, sobbing.

All the way down the four flights of stairs she wanted to flee back to her mother. It was with a cold impatience that she finally saw Walter approach the house, ten minutes late. He was so grotesque in his frantic, puffing hurry. He was no longer the brilliant Mr. Babson, but a moist young man who hemmed and sputtered, “Gee!—couldn’t find clean collar--hustled m’ head off—just missed Subway express—couldn’t make it—whew, I’m hot!”

“It doesn’t matter,” she condescended.

He dropped on the step just below her and mopped his forehead. Neither of them could say anything. He took off his horn-rimmed eye-glasses, carefully inserted the point of a pencil through the loop, swung them in a buzzing circle, and started to put them on again.

“Oh, keep them off!” she snapped. “You look so high-brow with them!”

“Y-yuh; why, s-sure!”

She felt very superior.

He feverishly ran a finger along the upper rim of his left ear, sprang up, stooped to take her hand, glared into her eyes till she shrank—and then a nail-cleaner, a common, ten-cent file, fell out of his inner pocket and clinked on the stone step.

“Oh, damn!” he groaned.

“I really think it is going to rain,” she said.

They both laughed.

He plumped down beside her, uncomfortably wedged between her and the rail. He caught her hand, intertwined their fingers so savagely that her knuckles hurt. “Look here,” he commanded, “you don’t really think it’s going to rain any such a darn thing! I’ve come fourteen billion hot miles up here for just fifteen minutes—yes, and you wanted to see me yourself, too! And now you want to talk about the history of recent rains.”

In the bitter-sweet spell of his clasp she was oblivious of street, children, sky. She tried to withdraw her hand, but he squeezed her fingers the more closely and their two hands dropped on her thin knee, which tingled to the impact.

“But—but what did you want to see me about?” Her superiority was burnt away.

He answered her hesitation with a trembling demand. “I can’t talk to you here! Can’t we go some place— Come walk toward the river.”

“Oh, I daren’t really, Walter. My mother feels so—so fidgety to-night and I must go back to her.... By and by.”

“But would you like to go with me?”

“Yes!”

“Then that’s all that matters!”

“Perhaps—perhaps we could go up on the roof here for just a few minutes. Then I must send you home.”

“Hooray! Come on.”

He boldly lifted her to her feet, followed her up the stairs. On the last dark flight, near the roof, he threw both arms about her and kissed her. She was amazed that she did not want to kiss him back, that his abandon did not stir her. Even while she was shocked and afraid, he kissed again, and she gave way to his kiss; her cold mouth grew desirous.

She broke away, with shocked pride—shocked most of all at herself, that she let him kiss her thus.

“You quiver so to my kiss!” he whispered, in awe.

“I don’t!” she denied. “It just doesn’t mean anything.”

“It does, and you know it does. I had to kiss you. Oh, sweetheart, sweetheart, we are both so lonely! Kiss me.”

“No, no!” She held him away from her.

“Yes, I tell you!”

She encircled his neck with her arm, laid her cheek beside his chin, rejoiced boundlessly in the man roughness of his chin, of his coat-sleeve, the man scent of him—scent of tobacco and soap and hair. She opened her lips to his. Slowly she drew her arm from about his neck, his arm from about her waist.

“Walter!” she mourned, “I did want you. But you must be good to me—not kiss me like that—not now, anyway, when I’m lonely for you and can’t resist you.... Oh, it wasn’t wrong, was it, when we needed each other so? It wasn’t wrong, was it?”

“Oh no—no!”

“But not—not again—not for a long while. I want you to respect me. Maybe it wasn’t wrong, dear, but it was terribly dangerous. Come, let’s stand out in the cool air on the roof for a while and then you must go home.”

They came out on the flat, graveled roof, round which all the glory of the city was blazing, and hand in hand, in a confidence delicately happy now, stood worshiping the spring.

“Dear,” he said, “I feel as though I were a robber who had gone crashing right through the hedge around your soul, and then after that come out in a garden—the sweetest, coolest garden.... I will try to be good to you—and for you.” He kissed her finger-tips.

“Yes, you did break through. At first it was just a kiss and the—oh, it was the kiss, and there wasn’t anything else. Oh, do let me live in the little garden still.”

“Trust me, dear.”

“I will trust you. Come. I must go down now.”

“Can I come to see you?”

“Yes.”

“Goldie, listen,” he said, as they came down-stairs to her hallway. “Any time you’d like to marry me—I don’t advise it, I guess I’d have good intentions, but be a darn poor hand at putting up shelves—but any time you’d like to marry me, or any of those nice conventional things, just lemme know, will you? Not that it matters much. What matters is, I want to kiss you good-night.”

“No, what matters is, I’m not going to let you!... Not to-night.... Good-night, dear.”

She scampered down the hall. She tiptoed into the living-room, and for an hour she brooded, felt faint and ashamed at her bold response to his kiss, yet wanted to feel his sharp-ridged lips again. Sometimes in a bitter frankness she told herself that Walter had never even thought of marriage till their kiss had fired him. She swore to herself that she would not give all her heart to love; that she would hold him off and make him value her precious little store of purity and tenderness. But passion and worry together were lost in a prayer for him. She knelt by the window till her own individuality was merged with that of the city’s million lovers.

§ 3

Like sickness and war, the office grind absorbs all personal desires. Love and ambition and wisdom it turns to its own purposes. Every day Una and Walter saw each other. Their hands touched as he gave her papers to file; there was affection in his voice when he dictated, and once, outside the office door, he kissed her. Yet their love was kept suspended. They could not tease each other and flirt raucously, like the telephone-girl and the elevator-starter.

Every day he begged her to go to dinner with him, to let him call at the flat, and after a week she permitted him to come.

§ 4

At dinner, when Una told her mother that a young gentleman at the office—in fact, Mr. Babson, the editor whose dictation she took—was going to call that evening, Mrs. Golden looked pleased, and said: “Isn’t that nice! Why, you never told mother he was interested in you!”

“Well, of course, we kind of work together—”

“I do hope he’s a nice, respectful young man, not one of these city people that flirt and drink cocktails and heaven knows what all!”

“Why, uh—I’m sure you’ll like him. Everybody says he’s the cleverest fellow in the shop.”

“Office, dear, not shop.... Is he— Does he get a big salary?”

“Why, mums, I’m sure I haven’t the slightest idea! How should I know?”

“Well, I just asked.... Will you put on your pink-and-white crêpe?”

“Don’t you think the brown silk would be better?”

“Why, Una, I want you to look your prettiest! You must make all the impression you can.”

“Well, perhaps I’d better,” Una said, demurely.

Despite her provincial training, Mrs. Golden had a much better instinct for dress than her sturdy daughter. So long as she was not left at home alone, her mild selfishness did not make her want to interfere with Una’s interests. She ah’d and oh’d over the torn border of Una’s crêpe dress, and mended it with quick, pussy-like movements of her fingers. She tried to arrange Una’s hair so that its pale golden texture would shine in broad, loose undulations, and she was as excited as Una when they heard Walter’s bouncing steps in the hall, his nervous tap at the door, his fumbling for a push-button.

Una dashed wildly to the bedroom for a last nose-powdering, a last glance at her hair and nails, and slowly paraded to the door to let him in, while Mrs. Golden stood primly, with folded hands, like a cabinet photograph of 1885.

So the irregular Walter came into a decidedly regular atmosphere and had to act like a pure-minded young editor.

They conversed—Lord! how they conversed! Mrs. Golden respectably desired to know Mr. Babson’s opinions on the weather, New-Yorkers, her little girl Una’s work, fashionable city ministers, the practical value of motor-cars, and the dietetic value of beans—the large, white beans, not the small, brown ones—she had grown both varieties in her garden at home (Panama, Pennsylvania, when Mr. Golden, Captain Golden he was usually called, was alive)—and had Mr. Babson ever had a garden, or seen Panama? And was Una really attending to her duties?

All the while Mrs. Golden’s canary trilled approval of the conversation.

Una listened, numbed, while Walter kept doing absurd things with his face—pinched his lips and tapped his teeth and rubbed his jaw as though he needed a shave. He took off his eye-glasses to wipe them and tied his thin legs in a knot, and all the while said, “Yes, there’s certainly a great deal to that.”

At a quarter to ten Mrs. Golden rose, indulged in a little kitten yawn behind her silvery hand, and said: “Well, I think I must be off to bed.... I find these May days so languid. Don’t you, Mr. Babson? Spring fever. I just can’t seem to get enough sleep.... Now you mustn’t stay up too late, Una dear.”

The bedroom door had not closed before Walter had darted from his chair, picked Una up, his hands pressing tight about her knees and shoulders, kissed her, and set her down beside him on the couch.

“Wasn’t I good, huh? Wasn’t I good, huh? Wasn’t I? Now who says Wally Babson ain’t a good parlor-pup, huh? Oh, you old darling, you were twice as agonized as me!”

And that was all he said—in words. Between them was a secret, a greater feeling of unfettered intimacy, because together they had been polite to mother—tragic, pitiful mother, who had been enjoying herself so much without knowing that she was in the way. That intimacy needed no words to express it; hands and cheeks and lips spoke more truly. They were children of emotion, young and crude and ignorant, groping for life and love, all the world new to them, despite their sorrows and waiting. They were clerklings, not lords of love and life, but all the more easily did they yield to longing for happiness. Between them was the battle of desire and timidity—and not all the desire was his, not hers all the timidity. She fancied sometimes that he was as much afraid as was she of debasing their shy seeking into unveiled passion. Yet his was the initiative; always she panted and wondered what he would do next, feared and wondered and rebuked—and desired.

He abruptly drew her head to his shoulder, smoothed her hair. She felt his fingers again communicate to her every nerve a tingling electric force. She felt his lips quest along her cheek and discover the soft little spot just behind her ear. She followed the restless course of his hands across her shoulders, down her arm, lingeringly over her hand. His hand seemed to her to have an existence quite apart from him, to have a mysterious existence of its own. In silence they rested there. She kept wondering if his shoulder had not been made just for her cheek. With little shivers she realized that this was his shoulder, Walter’s, a man’s, as the rough cloth prickled her skin. Silent they were, and for a time secure, but she kept speculating as to what he would dare to do next—and she fancied that he was speculating about precisely the same thing.

He drew a catching breath, and suddenly her lips were opening to his.

“Oh, you mustn’t—you promised—” she moaned, when she was able to draw back her head.

Again he kissed her, quickly, then released her and began to talk rapidly of—nothing. Apropos of offices and theaters and the tides of spring, he was really telling her that, powerful though his restless curiosity was, greatly though their poor little city bodies craved each other, yet he did respect her. She scarce listened, for at first she was bemused by two thoughts. She was inquiring sorrowfully whether it was only her body that stirred him—whether he found any spark in her honest little mind. And, for her second thought, she was considering in an injured way that this was not love as she had read of it in novels. “I didn’t know just what it would be—but I didn’t think it would be like this,” she declared.

Love, as depicted in such American novels by literary pastors and matrons of perfect purity as had sifted into the Panama public library, was an affair of astounding rescues from extreme peril, of highly proper walks in lanes, of laudable industry on the part of the hero, and of not more than three kisses—one on the brow, one on the cheek, and, in the very last paragraph of the book, one daringly but reverently deposited upon the lips. These young heroes and heroines never thought about bodies at all, except when they had been deceived in a field of asterisks. So to Una there was the world-old shock at the earthiness of love—and the penetrating joy of that earthiness. If real love was so much more vulgar than she had supposed, yet also it was so much more overwhelming that she was glad to be a flesh-and-blood lover, bruised and bewildered and estranged from herself, instead of a polite murmurer.

Gradually she was drawn back into a real communion with him when he damned the human race for serfs fighting in a dungeon, warring for land, for flags, for titles, and calling themselves kings. Walter took the same theories of socialism, single-tax, unionism, which J. J. Todd, of Chatham, had hacked out in commercial-college days, and he made them bleed and yawp and be hotly human. For the first time—Walter was giving her so many of those First Times of life!—Una realized how strong is the demand of the undermen for a conscious and scientific justice. She denied that stenographers could ever form a union, but she could not answer his acerb, “Why not?”

It was not in the patiently marching Una to be a creative thinker, yet she did hunger for self-mastery, and ardently was she following the erratic gibes at civilization with which young Walter showed his delight in having an audience, when the brown, homely Golden family clock struck eleven.

“Heavens!” she cried. “You must run home at once. Good-night, dear.”

He rose obediently, nor did their lips demand each other again.

Her mother awoke to yawn. “He is a very polite young man, but I don’t think he is solid enough for you, dearie. If he comes again, do remind me to show him the kodaks of your father, like I promised.”

Then Una began to ponder the problem which is so weighty to girls of the city—where she could see her lover, since the parks were impolite and her own home obtrusively dull to him.

Whether Walter was a peril or not, whether or not his love was angry and red and full of hurts, yet she knew that it was more to her than her mother or her conventions or her ambitious little job. Thus gladly confessing, she fell asleep, and a new office day began, for always the office claims one again the moment that the evening’s freedom is over.

CHAPTER VII

THESE children of the city, where there is no place for love-making, for discovering and testing each other’s hidden beings, ran off together in the scanted parties of the ambitious poor. Walter was extravagant financially as he was mentally, but he had many debts, some conscience, and a smallness of salary. She was pleased by the smallest diversions, however, and found luxury in a bowl of chop-suey. He took her to an Italian restaurant and pointed out supposititious artists. They had gallery seats for a Maude Adams play, at which she cried and laughed whole-heartedly and held his hand all through. Her first real tea was with him—in Panama one spoke of “ladies’ afternoon tea,” not of “tea.” She was awed by his new walking-stick and the new knowledge of cinnamon toast which he displayed for her. She admired, too, the bored way he swung his stick as they sauntered into and out of the lobbies of the great hotels.

The first flowers from a real florist’s which she had ever received, except for a bunch of carnations from Henry Carson at Panama high-school commencement, came from Walter—long-stemmed roses in damp paper and a florist’s box, with Walter’s card inside.

And perhaps the first time that she had ever really seen spring, felt the intense light of sky and cloud and fresh greenery as her own, was on a Sunday just before the fragrant first of June, when Walter and she slipped away from her mother and walked in Central Park, shabby but unconscious.

She explored with him, too; felt adventurous in quite respectable Japanese and Greek and Syrian restaurants.

But her mother waited for her at home, and the job, the office, the desk, demanded all her energy.

Had they seen each other less frequently, perhaps Walter would have let dreams serve for real kisses, and have been satisfied. But he saw her a hundred times a day—and yet their love progressed so little. The propinquity of the office tantalized them. And Mrs. Golden kept them apart.

§ 2

The woman who had aspired and been idle while Captain Golden had toiled for her, who had mourned and been idle while Una had planned for her, and who had always been a compound of selfishness and love, was more and more accustomed to taking her daughter’s youth to feed her comfort and her canary—a bird of atrophied voice and uncleanly habit.

If this were the history of the people who wait at home, instead of the history of the warriors, rich credit would be given to Mrs. Golden for enduring the long, lonely days, listening for Una’s step. A proud, patient woman with nothing to do all day but pick at a little housework, and read her eyes out, and wish that she could run in and be neighborly with the indifferent urbanites who formed about her a wall of ice. Yet so confused are human purposes that this good woman who adored her daughter also sapped her daughter’s vigor. As the office loomed behind all of Una’s desires, so behind the office, in turn, was ever the shadowy thought of the appealing figure there at home; and toward her mother Una was very compassionate.

Yes, and so was her mother!

Mrs. Golden liked to sit soft and read stories of young love. Partly by nature and partly because she had learned that thus she could best obtain her wishes, she was gentle as a well-filled cat and delicate as a tulle scarf. She was admiringly adhesive to Una as she had been to Captain Golden, and she managed the new master of the house just as she had managed the former one. She listened to dictates pleasantly, was perfectly charmed at suggestions that she do anything, and then gracefully forgot.

Mrs. Golden was a mistress of graceful forgetting. Almost never did she remember to do anything she didn’t want to do. She did not lie about it; she really and quite beautifully did forget.

Una, hurrying off to the office every morning, agonized with the effort to be on time, always had to stop and prepare a written list of the things her mother was to do. Otherwise, bespelled by the magazine stories which she kept forgetting and innocently rereading, Mrs. Golden would forget the marketing, forget to put the potatoes on to boil, forget to scrub the bathroom.... And she often contrived to lose the written list, and searched for it, with trembling lips but no vast persistence.

Una, bringing home the palsying weariness of the day’s drudgery, would find a cheery welcome—and the work not done; no vegetables for dinner, no fresh boric-acid solution prepared for washing her stinging eyes.

Nor could Una herself get the work immediately out of the way, because her mother was sure to be lonely, to need comforting before Una could devote herself to anything else or even wash away the sticky office grime.... Mrs. Golden would have been shocked into a stroke could she have known that while Una was greeting her, she was muttering within herself, “I do wish I could brush my teeth first!”

If Una was distraught, desirous of disappearing in order to get hold of herself, Mrs. Golden would sigh, “Dear, have I done something to make you angry?” In any case, whether Una was silent or vexed with her, the mother would manage to be hurt but brave; sweetly distressed, but never quite tearful. And Una would have to kiss her, pat her hair, before she could escape and begin to get dinner (with her mother helping, always ready to do anything that Una’s doggedly tired mind might suggest, but never suggesting novelties herself).

After dinner, Mrs. Golden was always ready to do whatever Una wished—to play cribbage, or read aloud, or go for a walk—not a long walk; she was so delicate, you know, but a nice little walk with her dear, dear daughter.... For such amusements she was ready to give up all her own favorite evening diversions—namely, playing solitaire, and reading and taking nice little walks.... But she did not like to have Una go out and leave her, nor have naughty, naughty men like Walter take Una to the theater, as though they wanted to steal the dear daughter away. And she wore Una’s few good frocks, and forgot to freshen them in time for Una to wear them. Otherwise, Mrs. Golden had the unselfishness of a saint on a marble pillar.

Una, it is true, sometimes voiced her irritation over her mother’s forgetfulness and her subsequent pathos, but for that bitterness she always blamed herself, with horror remembered each cutting word she had said to the Little Mother Saint (as, in still hours when they sat clasped like lovers, she tremblingly called her).

§ 3

Mrs. Golden’s demand of Una for herself had never been obvious till it clashed with Walter’s demand.

Una and Walter talked it over, but they seemed mutely to agree, after the evening of Mrs. Golden and conversation, that it was merely balking for him to call at the flat. Nor did Una and Mrs. Golden discuss why Mr. Babson did not come again, or whether Una was seeing him. Una was accustomed to say only that she would be “away this evening,” but over the teapot she quoted Walter’s opinions on Omar, agnosticism, motor magazines, pipe-smoking, Staten Island, and the Himalayas, and it was evident that she was often with him.

Mrs. Golden’s method of opposition was very simple. Whenever Una announced that she was going out, her mother’s bright, birdlike eyes filmed over; she sighed and hesitated, “Shall I be alone all evening—after all day, too?” Una felt like a brute. She tried to get her mother to go to the Sessionses’ flat more often, to make new friends, but Mrs. Golden had lost all her adaptability. She clung to Una and to her old furniture as the only recognizable parts of her world. Often Una felt forced to refuse Walter’s invitations; always she refused to walk with him on the long, splendid Saturday afternoons of freedom. Nor would she let him come and sit on the roof with her, lest her mother see them in the hall and be hurt.

So it came to pass that only in public did she meet Walter. He showed his resentment by inviting her out less and less, by telling her less and less frankly his ambitions and his daily dabs at becoming a great man. Apparently he was rather interested in a flour-faced actress at his boarding-house.

Never, now, did he speak of marriage. The one time when he had spoken of it, Una had been so sure of their happiness that she had thought no more of that formality than had his reckless self. But now she yearned to have him “propose,” in the most stupid, conventional, pink-romance fashion. “Why can’t we be married?” she fancied herself saying to him, but she never dared say it aloud.

Often he was abstracted when he was with her, in the office or out. Always he was kindly, but the kindliness seemed artificial. She could not read his thoughts, now that she had no hand-clasp to guide her.

On a hot, quivering afternoon of early July, Walter came to her desk at closing-hour and said, abruptly: “Look. You’ve simply got to come out with me this evening. We’ll dine at a little place at the foot of the Palisades. I can’t stand seeing you so little. I won’t ask you again! You aren’t fair.”

“Oh, I don’t mean to be unfair—”

“Will you come? Will you?”

His voice glared. Regardless of the office folk about them, he put his hand over hers. She was sure that Miss Moynihan was bulkily watching them. She dared not take time to think.

“Yes,” she said, “I will go.”

§ 4

It was a beer-garden frequented by yachtless German yachtsmen in shirt-sleeves, boating-caps, and mustaches like muffs, but to Una it was Europe and the banks of the Rhine, that restaurant below the Palisades where she dined with Walter.

A placid hour it was, as dusk grew deeper and more fragrant, and they leaned over the terrace rail to meditate on the lights springing out like laughing jests incarnate—reflected lights of steamers paddling with singing excursionists up the Hudson to the storied hills of Rip Van Winkle; imperial sweeps of fire that outlined the mighty city across the river.

Walter was at peace. He spared her his swart intensity; he shyly quoted Tennyson, and bounced with cynicisms about “Sherbert Souse” and “the Gas-bag.” He brought happiness to her, instead of the agitation of his kisses.

She was not an office machine now, but one with the village lovers of poetry, as her job-exhaustion found relief in the magic of the hour, in the ancient music of the river, in breezes which brought old tales down from the Catskills.

She would have been content to sit there for hours, listening to the twilight, absently pleating the coarse table-cloth, trying to sip the saline claret which he insisted on their drinking. She wanted nothing more.... And she had so manœuvered their chairs that the left side of her face, the better side, was toward him!

But Walter grew restless. He stared at the German yachtsmen, at their children who ate lumps of sugar dipped in claret, and their wives who drank beer. He commented needlessly on a cat which prowled along the terrace rail. He touched Una’s foot with his, and suddenly condemned himself for not having been able to bring her to a better restaurant. He volubly pointed out that their roast chicken had been petrified—“vile restaurant, very vile food.”

“Why, I love it here!” she protested. “I’m perfectly happy to be just like this.”

As she turned to him with a smile that told all her tenderness, she noted how his eyes kept stealing from the riverside to her, and back again, how his hands trembled as he clapped two thick glass salt-shakers together. A current of uneasiness darted between them.

He sprang up. “Oh, I can’t sit still!” he said. “Come on. Let’s walk down along the river.”

“Oh, can’t we just sit here and be quiet?” she pleaded, but he rubbed his chin and shook his head and sputtered: “Oh, rats, you can’t see the river, now that they’ve turned on the electric lights here. Come on. Besides, it’ll be cooler right by the river.”

She felt a menace; the darkness beyond them was no longer dreaming, but terror-filled. She wanted to refuse, but he was so fretfully demanding that she could only obey him.

Up on the crest of the Palisades is an “amusement park,” and suburbs and crowded paths; and across the river is New York, in a solid mass of apartment-houses; but between Palisades and river, at the foot of the cliffs, is an unfrequented path which still keeps some of the wildness it had when it was a war-path of the Indians. It climbs ridges, twists among rocks, dips into damp hollows, widens out into tiny bowling-greens for Hendrik Hudson’s fairy men. By night it is ghostly, and beside it the river whispers strange tragedies.

Along this path the city children crept, unspeaking, save when his two hands, clasping her waist to guide her down a rocky descent, were clamorous.

Where a bare sand jetty ran from the path out into the river’s broad current, Walter stopped and whispered, “I wish we could go swimming.”

“I wish we could—it’s quite warm,” she said, prosaically.

But river and dark woods and breeze overhead seemed to whisper to her—whisper, whisper, all the shrouded night aquiver with low, eager whispers. She shivered to find herself imagining the unimaginable—that she might throw off her stodgy office clothes, her dull cloth skirt and neat blouse, and go swimming beside him, revel in giving herself up to the utter frankness of cool water laving her bare flesh.

She closed her mind. She did not condemn herself for wanting to bathe as Mother Eve had bathed, naked and unafraid. She did not condemn herself—but neither did she excuse. She was simply afraid. She dared not try to make new standards; she took refuge in the old standards of the good little Una. Though all about her called the enticing voices of night and the river, yet she listened for the tried counsel voices of the plain Panama streets and the busy office.

While she struggled, Walter stood with his arm fitted about her shoulder, letting the pregnant silence speak, till again he insisted: “Why couldn’t we go swimming?” Then, with all the cruelly urgent lovers of the days of hungry poetry: “We’re going to let youth go by and never dare to be mad. Time will get us—we’ll be old—it will be too late to enjoy being mad.” His lyric cry dropped to a small-boy excuse: “Besides, it wouldn’t hurt.... Come on. Think of plunging in.”

“No, no, no, no!” she cried, and ran from him up the jetty, back to the path.... She was not afraid of him, because she was so much more afraid of herself.

He followed sullenly as the path led them farther and farther. She stopped on a rise, and found herself able to say, calmly, “Don’t you think we’d better go back now?”

“Maybe we ought to. But sit down here.”

He hunched up his knees, rested his elbows on them, and said, abstractedly, apparently talking to himself as much as to her:

“I’m sorry I’ve been so grouchy coming down the path. But I don’t apologize for wanting us to go swimming. Civilization, the world’s office-manager, tells us to work like fiends all day and be lonely and respectable all evening, and not even marry till we’re thirty, because we can’t afford to! That’s all right for them as likes to become nice varnished desks, but not for me! I’m going to hunger and thirst and satisfy my appetites—even if it makes me selfish as the devil. I’d rather be that than be a bran-stuffed automaton that’s never human enough to hunger. But of course you’re naturally a Puritan and always will be one, no matter what you do. You’re a good sort— I’d trust you to the limit—you’re sincere and you want to grow. But me—my Wanderjahr isn’t over yet. Maybe some time we’ll again— I admire you, but—if I weren’t a little mad I’d go literally mad.... Mad—mad!”

He suddenly undid the first button of her blouse and kissed her neck harshly, while she watched him, in a maze. He abruptly fastened the button again, sprang up, stared out at the wraith-filled darkness over the river, while his voice droned on, as though it were a third person speaking:

“I suppose there’s a million cases a year in New York of crazy young chaps making violent love to decent girls and withdrawing because they have some hidden decency themselves. I’m ashamed that I’m one of them—me, I’m as bad as a nice little Y. M. C. A. boy—I bow to conventions, too. Lordy! the fact that I’m so old-fashioned as even to talk about ‘conventions’ in this age of Shaw and d’Annunzio shows that I’m still a small-town, district-school radical! I’m really as mid-Victorian as you are, in knowledge. Only I’m modern by instinct, and the combination will always keep me half-baked, I suppose. I don’t know what I want from life, and if I did I wouldn’t know how to get it. I’m a Middle Western farmer, and yet I regard myself about half the time as an Oxford man with a training in Paris. You’re lucky, girl. You have a definite ambition—either to be married and have babies or to boss an office. Whatever I did, I’d spoil you—at least I would till I found myself—found out what I wanted.... Lord! how I hope I do find myself some day!”

“Poor boy!” she suddenly interrupted; “it’s all right. Come, we’ll go home and try to be good.”

“Wonderful! There speaks the American woman, perfectly. You think I’m just chattering. You can’t understand that I was never so desperately in earnest in my life. Well, to come down to cases. Specification A—I couldn’t marry you, because we haven’t either of us got any money—aside from my not having found myself yet. Ditto B—We can’t play, just because you are a Puritan and I’m a typical intellectual climber. Same C—I’ve actually been offered a decent job in the advertising department of a motor-car company in Omaha, and now I think I’ll take it.”

And that was all that he really had to say, just that last sentence, though for more than an hour they discussed themselves and their uncharted world, Walter trying to be honest, yet to leave with her a better impression of himself; Una trying to keep him with her. It was hard for her to understand that Walter really meant all he said.

But, like him, she was frank.

There are times in any perplexed love when the lovers revel in bringing out just those problems and demands and complaints which they have most carefully concealed. At such a time of mutual confession, if the lovers are honest and tender, there is none of the abrasive hostility of a vulgar quarrel. But the kindliness of the review need not imply that it is profitable; often it ends, as it began, with the wail, “What can we do?” But so much alike are all the tribe of lovers, that the debaters never fail to stop now and then to congratulate themselves on being so frank!

Thus Una and Walter, after a careful survey of the facts that he was too restless, that she was too Panamanian and too much mothered, after much argument as to what he had meant when he had said this, and what she had thought he meant when he had said that, and whether he could ever have been so inconsiderate as to have said the other, and frequent admiration of themselves for their open-mindedness, the questing lovers were of the same purpose as at the beginning of their inquiry. He still felt the urge to take up his pilgrimage again, to let the “decent job” and Omaha carry him another stage in his search for the shrouded gods of his nebulous faith. And she still begged for a chance to love, to be needed; still declared that he was merely running away from himself.

They had quite talked themselves out before he sighed: “I don’t dare to look and see what time it is. Come, we’ll have to go.”

They swung arms together shyly as they stumbled back over the path. She couldn’t believe that he really would go off to the West, of which she was so ignorant. But she felt as though she were staggering into a darkness blinder and ever more blind.

When she got home she found her mother awake, very angry over Una’s staying out till after midnight, and very wordy about the fact that “that nice, clean young man,” Mr. J. J. Todd, of Chatham and of the commercial college, had come to call that evening. Una made little answer to her. Through her still and sacred agony she could scarce hear her mother’s petulant whining.

§ 5

Next morning at the office, Walter abruptly asked her to come out into the hall, told her that he was leaving without notice that afternoon. He could never bear to delay, once he had started out on the “Long Trail,” he said, not looking at her. He hastily kissed her, and darted back into the office. She did not see him again till, at five-thirty, he gave noisy farewell to all the adoring stenographers and office-boys, and ironical congratulations to his disapproving chiefs. He stopped at her desk, hesitated noticeably, then said, “Good-by, Goldie,” and passed on. She stared, hypnotized, as, for the last time, Walter went bouncing out of the office.

§ 6

A week later J. J. Todd called on her again. He was touching in his description of his faithful labor for the Charity Organization Society. But she felt dead; she could not get herself to show approval. It was his last call.

§ 7

Walter wrote to her on the train—a jumbled rhapsody on missing her honest companionship. Then a lively description of his new chief at Omaha. A lonely letter on a barren evening, saying that there was nothing to say. A note about a new project of going to Alaska. She did not hear from him again.

§ 8

For weeks she missed him so tragically that she found herself muttering over and over, “Now I sha’n’t ever have a baby that would be a little image of him.”

When she thought of the shy games and silly love-words she had lavished, she was ashamed, and wondered if they had made her seem a fool to him.

But presently in the week’s unchanging routine she found an untroubled peace; and in mastering her work she had more comfort than ever in his clamorous summons.

At home she tried not merely to keep her mother from being lonely, but actually to make her happy, to coax her to break into the formidable city. She arranged summer-evening picnics with the Sessionses.

She persuaded them to hold one of these picnics at the foot of the Palisades. During it she disappeared for nearly half an hour. She sat alone by the river. Suddenly, with a feverish wrench, she bared her breast, then shook her head angrily, rearranged her blouse, went back to the group, and was unusually gay, though all the while she kept her left hand on her breast, as though it pained her.

She had been with the Gazette for only a little over six months, and she was granted only a week’s vacation. This she spent with her mother at Panama. In parties with old neighbors she found sweetness, and on a motor-trip with Henry Carson and his fiancée, a young widow, she let the fleeting sun-flecked land absorb her soul.

At the office Una was transferred to S. Herbert Ross’s department, upon Walter’s leaving. She sometimes took S. Herbert’s majestic, flowing dictation. She tried not merely to obey his instructions, but also to discover his unvoiced wishes. Her wage was raised from eight dollars a week to ten. She again determined to be a real business woman. She read a small manual on advertising.

But no one in the Gazette office believed that a woman could bear responsibilities, not even S. Herbert Ross, with his aphorisms for stenographers, his prose poems about the ecstatic joy of running a typewriter nine hours a day, which appeared in large, juicy-looking type in business magazines.

She became bored, mechanical, somewhat hopeless. She planned to find a better job and resign. In which frame of mind she was rather contemptuous of the Gazette office; and it was an unforgettable shock suddenly to be discharged.

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.

§ 3

Una, an errand-boy, and a young East-Side Jewish stenographer named Bessie Kraker made up the office force of Troy Wilkins. The office was on the eighth floor of the Septimus Building, which is a lean, jerry-built, flashingly pretentious cement structure with cracking walls and dirty, tiled hallways.

The smeary, red-gold paint which hides the imperfect ironwork of its elevators does not hide the fact that they groan like lost souls, and tremble and jerk and threaten to fall. The Septimus Building is typical of at least one half of a large city. It was “run up” by a speculative builder for a “quick turn-over.” It is semi-fire-proof, but more semi than fire-proof. It stands on Nassau Street, between two portly stone buildings that try to squeeze this lanky impostor to death, but there is more cheerful whistling in its hallways than in the halls of its disapproving neighbors. Near it is City Hall Park and Newspaper Row, Wall Street and the lordly Stock Exchange, but, aside from a few dull and honest tenants like Mr. Troy Wilkins, the Septimus Building is filled with offices of fly-by-night companies—shifty promoters, mining-concerns, beauty-parlors for petty brokers, sample-shoe shops, discreet lawyers, and advertising dentists. Seven desks in one large room make up the entire headquarters of eleven international corporations, which possess, as capital, eleven hundred and thirty dollars, much embossed stationery—and the seven desks. These modest capitalists do not lease their quarters by the year. They are doing very well if they pay rent for each of four successive months. But also they do not complain about repairs; they are not fussy about demanding a certificate of moral perfection from the janitor. They speak cheerily to elevator-boys and slink off into saloons. Not all of them keep Yom Kippur; they all talk of being “broad-minded.”

Mr. Wilkins’s office was small and agitated. It consisted of two rooms and an insignificant entry-hall, in which last was a water-cooler, a postal scale, a pile of newspapers, and a morose office-boy who drew copies of Gibson girls all day long on stray pieces of wrapping-paper, and confided to Una, at least once a week, that he wanted to take a correspondence course in window-dressing. In one of the two rooms Mr. Wilkins cautiously made drawings at a long table, or looked surprised over correspondence at a small old-fashioned desk, or puffed and scratched as he planned form-letters to save his steadily waning business.

In the other room there were the correspondence-files, and the desks of Una, the chief stenographer, and of slangy East-Side Bessie Kraker, who conscientiously copied form-letters, including all errors in them, and couldn’t, as Wilkins complainingly pointed out, be trusted with dictation which included any words more difficult than “sincerely.”

From their window the two girls could see the windows of an office across the street. About once a month an interesting curly-haired youth leaned out of one of the windows opposite. Otherwise there was no view.

§ 4

Twelve o’clock, the hour at which most of the offices closed on Saturday in summer, was excitedly approaching. The office-women throughout the Septimus Building, who had been showing off their holiday frocks all morning, were hastily finishing letters, or rushing to the women’s wash-rooms to discuss with one another the hang of new skirts. All morning Bessie Kraker had kept up a monologue, beginning, “Say, lis-ten, Miss Golden, say, gee! I was goin’ down to South Beach with my gentleman friend this afternoon, and, say, what d’you think the piker had to go and get stuck for? He’s got to work all afternoon. I don’t care—I don’t care! I’m going to Coney Island with Sadie, and I bet you we pick up some fellows and do the light fantastic till one G. M. Oh, you sad sea waves! I bet Sadie and me make’em sad!”

“But we’ll be straight,” said Bessie, half an hour later, apropos of nothing. “But gee! it’s fierce to not have any good times without you take a risk. But gee! my dad would kill me if I went wrong. He reads the Talmud all the time, and hates Goys. But gee! I can’t stand it all the time being a mollycoddle. I wisht I was a boy! I’d be a’ aviator.”

Bessie had a proud new blouse with a deep V, the edges of which gaped a bit and suggested that by ingenuity one could see more than was evident at first. Troy Wilkins, while pretending to be absent-mindedly fussing about a correspondence-file that morning, had forgotten that he was much married and had peered at the V. Una knew it, and the sordidness of that curiosity so embarrassed her that she stopped typing to clutch at the throat of her own high-necked blouse, her heart throbbing. She wanted to run away. She had a vague desire to “help” Bessie, who purred at poor, good Mr. Wilkins and winked at Una and chewed gum enjoyably, who was brave and hardy and perfectly able to care for herself—an organism modified by the Ghetto to the life which still bewildered Una.

Mr. Wilkins went home at 11.17, after giving them enough work to last till noon. The office-boy chattily disappeared two minutes later, while Bessie went two minutes after that. Her delay was due to the adjustment of her huge straw hat, piled with pink roses and tufts of blue malines.

Una stayed till twelve. Her ambition had solidified into an unreasoning conscientiousness.

With Bessie gone, the office was so quiet that she hesitated to typewrite lest They sneak up on her—They who dwell in silent offices as They dwell beneath a small boy’s bed at night. The hush was intimidating; her slightest movement echoed; she stopped the sharply tapping machine after every few words to listen.

At twelve she put on her hat with two jabs of the hat-pins, and hastened to the elevator, exulting in freedom. The elevator was crowded with girls in new white frocks, voluble about their afternoon’s plans. One of them carried a wicker suit-case. She was, she announced, starting on her two weeks’ vacation; there would be some boys, and she was going to have “a peach of a time.”

Una and her mother had again spent a week of June in Panama, and she now recalled the bright, free mornings and lingering, wonderful twilights.

She had no place to go this holiday afternoon, and she longed to join a noisy, excited party. Of Walter Babson she did not think. She stubbornly determined to snatch this time of freedom. Why, of course, she asserted, she could play by herself quite happily! With a spurious gaiety she patted her small black hand-bag. She skipped across to the Sixth Avenue Elevated and went up to the department-store district. She made elaborate plans for the great adventure of shopping. Bessie Kraker had insisted, with the nonchalant shrillness of eighteen, that Una “had ought to wear more color”; and Una had found, in the fashion section of a woman’s magazine, the suggestion for exactly the thing—“a modest, attractive frock of brown, with smart touches of orange”—and economical. She had the dress planned—ribbon-belt half brown and half orange, a collar edged with orange, cuffs slashed with it.

There were a score of mild matter-of-fact Unas on the same Elevated train with her, in their black hats and black jackets and black skirts and white waists, with one hint of coquetry in a white-lace jabot or a white-lace veil; faces slightly sallow or channeled with care, but eyes that longed to flare with love; women whom life didn’t want except to type its letters about invoices of rubber heels; women who would have given their salvation for the chance to sacrifice themselves for love.... And there was one man on that Elevated train, a well-bathed man with cynical eyes, who read a little book with a florid gold cover, all about Clytemnestra, because he was certain that modern cities have no fine romance, no high tragedy; that you must go back to the Greeks for real feeling. He often aphorized, “Frightfully hackneyed to say, ’woman’s place is in the home,’ but really, you know, these women going to offices, vulgarizing all their fine womanliness, and this shrieking sisterhood going in for suffrage and Lord knows what. Give me the reticences of the harem rather than one of these office-women with gum-chewing vacuities. None of them clever enough to be tragic!” He was ever so whimsical about the way in which the suffrage movement had cheated him of the chance to find a “grande amoureuse.” He sat opposite Una in the train and solemnly read his golden book. He did not see Una watch with shy desire every movement of a baby that was talking to its mother in some unknown dialect of baby-land. He was feeling deep sensations about Clytemnestra’s misfortunes—though he controlled his features in the most gentlemanly manner, and rose composedly at his station, letting a well-bred glance of pity fall upon the gum-chewers.

Una found a marvelously clean, new restaurant on Sixth Avenue, with lace curtains at the window and, between the curtains, a red geranium in a pot covered with red-crêpe paper tied with green ribbon. A new place! She was tired of the office, the Elevated, the flat on 148th Street, the restaurants where she tediously had her week-day lunches. She entered the new restaurant briskly, swinging her black bag. The place had Personality—the white enameled tables were set diagonally and clothed with strips of Japanese toweling. Una smiled at a lively photograph of two bunnies in a basket. With a sensation of freedom and novelty she ordered coffee, chicken patty, and cocoanut layer-cake.

But the patty and the cake were very much like the hundreds of other patties and cakes which she had consumed during the past two years, and the people about her were of the horde of lonely workers who make up half of New York. The holiday enchantment dissolved. She might as well be going back to the office grind after lunch! She brooded, while outside, in that seething summer street, the pageant of life passed by and no voice summoned her. Men and girls and motors, people who laughed and waged commerce for the reward of love—they passed her by, life passed her by, a spectator untouched by joy or noble tragedy, a woman desperately hungry for life.

She began—but not bitterly, she was a good little thing, you know—to make the old familiar summary. She had no lover, no friend, no future. Walter—he might be dead, or married. Her mother and the office, between them, left her no time to seek lover or friend or success. She was a prisoner of affection and conscience.

She rose and paid her check. She did not glance at the picture of the bunnies in a basket. She passed out heavily, a woman of sterile sorrow.

§ 5

Una recovered her holiday by going shopping. An aisle-man in the dress-goods department, a magnificent creature in a braided morning-coat, directed her to the counter she asked for, spoke eloquently of woolen voiles, picked up her bag, and remarked, “Yes, we do manage to keep it cool here, even on the hottest days.” A shop-girl laughed with her. She stole into one of the elevators, and, though she really should have gone home to her mother, she went into the music department, where, among lattices wreathed with newly dusted roses, she listened to waltzes and two-steps played by a red-haired girl who was chewing gum and talking to a man while she played. The music roused Una to plan a wild dissipation. She would pretend that she had a sweetheart, that with him she was a-roving.

Una was not highly successful in her make-believe. She could not picture the imaginary man who walked beside her. She refused to permit him to resemble Walter Babson, and he refused to resemble anybody else. But she was throbbingly sure he was there as she entered a drug-store and bought a “Berline bonbon,” a confection guaranteed to increase the chronic nervous indigestion from which stenographers suffer. Her shadow lover tried to hold her hand. She snatched it away and blushed. She fancied that a matron at the next tiny table was watching her silly play, reflected in the enormous mirror behind the marble soda-counter. The lover vanished. As she left the drug-store Una was pretending that she was still pretending, but found it difficult to feel so very exhilarated.

She permitted herself to go to a motion-picture show. She looked over all the posters in front of the theater, and a train-wreck, a seaside love-scene, a detective drama, all invited her.

A man in the seat in front of her in the theater nestled toward his sweetheart and harshly muttered, “Oh you old honey!” In the red light from the globe marking an exit she saw his huge red hand, with its thicket of little golden hairs, creep toward the hand of the girl.

Una longed for a love-scene on the motion-picture screen.

The old, slow familiar pain of congestion in the back of her neck came back. But she forgot the pain when the love-scene did appear, in a picture of a lake shore with a hotel porch, the flat sheen of photographed water, rushing boats, and a young hero with wavy black hair, who dived for the lady and bore her out when she fell out of a reasonably safe boat. The actor’s wet, white flannels clung tight about his massive legs; he threw back his head with masculine arrogance, then kissed the lady. Una was dizzy with that kiss. She was shrinking before Walter’s lips again. She could feel her respectable, typewriter-hardened fingers stroke the actor’s swarthy, virile jaw. She gasped with the vividness of the feeling. She was shocked at herself; told herself she was not being “nice”; looked guiltily about; but passionately she called for the presence of her vague, imaginary lover.

“Oh, my dear, my dear, my dear!” she whispered, with a terrible cloistered sweetness—whispered to love itself.

Deliberately ignoring the mother who waited at home, she determined to spend a riotous evening going to a real theater, a real play. That is, if she could get a fifty-cent seat.

She could not.

“It’s been exciting, running away, even if I can’t go to the theater,” Una comforted herself. “I’ll go down to Lady Sessions’s this evening. I’ll pack mother off to bed. I’ll take the Sessionses up some ice-cream, and we’ll have a jolly time.... Mother won’t care if I go. Or maybe she’ll come with me”—knowing all the while that her mother would not come, and decidedly would care if Una deserted her.

However negligible her mother seemed from down-town, she loomed gigantic as Una approached their flat and assured herself that she was glad to be returning to the dear one.

The flat was on the fifth floor.

It was a dizzying climb—particularly on this hot afternoon.

§ 6

As Una began to trudge up the flat-sounding slate treads she discovered that her head was aching as though some one were pinching the top of her eyeballs. Each time she moved her head the pain came in a perceptible wave. The hallway reeked with that smell of onions and fried fish which had arrived with the first tenants. Children were dragging noisy objects about the halls. As the throb grew sharper during the centuries it took her to climb the first three flights of stairs, Una realized how hot she was, how the clammy coolness of the hall was penetrated by stabs of street heat which entered through the sun-haloed windows at the stair landings.

Una knocked at the door of her flat with that light, cheery tapping of her nails, like a fairy tattoo, which usually brought her mother running to let her in. She was conscious, almost with a physical sensation, of her mother; wanted to hold her close and, in the ecstasy of that caress, squeeze the office weariness from her soul. The Little Mother Saint—she was coming now—she was hurrying—

But the little mother was not hurrying. There was no response to Una’s knock. As Una stooped in the dimness of the hallway to search in her bag for her latch-key, the pain pulsed through the top of her head again. She opened the door, and her longing for the embrace of her mother disappeared in healthy anger.

The living-room was in disorder. Her mother had not touched it all day—had gone off and left it.

“This is a little too much!” Una said, grimly.

The only signs of life were Mrs. Golden’s pack of cards for solitaire, her worn, brown Morris-chair, and accretions of the cheap magazines with pretty-girl covers which Mrs. Golden ransacked for love-stories. Mrs. Golden had been reading all the evening before, and pages of newspapers were crumpled in her chair, not one of them picked up. The couch, where Una had slept because it had been too hot for the two of them in a double bed, was still an eruption of bedclothes—the pillow wadded up, the sheets dragging out across the unswept floor.... The room represented discomfort, highly respectable poverty—and cleaning, which Una had to do before she could rest.

She sat down on the couch and groaned: “To have to come home to this! I simply can’t trust mother. She hasn’t done one—single—thing, not one single thing. And if it were only the first time—! But it’s every day, pretty nearly. She’s been asleep all day, and then gone for a walk. Oh yes, of course! She’ll come back and say she’d forgotten this was Saturday and I’d be home early! Oh, of course!”

From the bedroom came a cough, then another. Una tried to keep her soft little heart in its temporary state of hardness long enough to have some effect on household discipline. “Huh!” she grunted. “Got a cold again. If she’d only stay outdoors a little—”

She stalked to the door of the bedroom. The blind was down, the window closed, the room stifling and filled with a yellow, unwholesome glimmer. From the bed her mother’s voice, changed from its usual ring to a croak that was crepuscular as the creepy room, wheezed: “That—you—deary? I got—summer—cold—so sorry—leave work undone—”

“If you would only keep your windows open, my dear mother—”

Una marched to the window, snapped up the blind, banged up the sash, and left the room.

“I really can’t see why!” was all she added. She did not look at her mother.

She slapped the living-room into order as though the disordered bedclothes and newspapers were bad children. She put the potatoes on to boil. She loosened her tight collar and sat down to read the “comic strips,” the “Beauty Hints,” and the daily instalment of the husband-and-wife serial in her evening paper. Una had nibbled at Shakespeare, Tennyson, Longfellow, and Vanity Fair in her high-school days, but none of these had satisfied her so deeply as did the serial’s hint of sex and husband. She was absorbed by it. Yet all the while she was irritably conscious of her mother’s cough—hacking, sore-sounding, throat-catching. Una was certain that this was merely one of the frequent imaginary ailments of her mother, who was capable of believing that she had cancer every time she was bitten by a mosquito. But this incessant crackling made Una jumpily anxious.

She reached these words in the serial: “I cannot forget, Amy, that whatever I am, my good old mother made me, with her untiring care and the gentle words she spoke to me when worried and harassed with doubt.”

Una threw down the paper, rushed into the bedroom, crouched beside her mother, crying, “Oh, my mother sweetheart! You’re just everything to me,” and kissed her forehead.

The forehead was damp and cold, like a cellar wall. Una sat bolt up in horror. Her mother’s face had a dusky flush, her lips were livid as clotted blood. Her arms were stiff, hard to the touch. Her breathing, rapid and agitated, like a frightened panting, was interrupted just then by a cough like the rattling of stiff, heavy paper, which left on her purple lips a little colorless liquid.

“Mother! Mother! My little mother—you’re sick, you’re really sick, and I didn’t know and I spoke so harshly. Oh, what is it, what is it, mother dear?”

“Bad—cold,” Mrs. Golden whispered. “I started coughing last night—I closed the door—you didn’t hear me; you were in the other room—” Another cough wheezed dismally, shook her, gurgled in her yellow deep-lined neck. “C-could I have—window closed now?”

“No. I’m going to be your nurse. Just an awfully cranky old nurse, and so scientific. And you must have fresh air.” Her voice broke. “Oh, and me sleeping away from you! I’ll never do it again. I don’t know what I would do if anything happened to you.... Do you feel any headache, dear?”

“No—not—not so much as— Side pains me—here.”

Mrs. Golden’s words labored like a steamer in heavy seas; the throbbing of her heart shook them like the throb of the engines. She put her hand to her right side, shakily, with effort. It lay there, yellow against the white muslin of her nightgown, then fell heavily to the bed, like a dead thing. Una trembled with fear as her mother continued, “My pulse—it’s so fast—so hard breathing—side pain.”

“I’ll put on an ice compress and then I’ll go and get a doctor.”

Mrs. Golden tried to sit up. “Oh no, no, no! Not a doctor! Not a doctor!” she croaked. “Doctor Smyth will be busy.”

“Well, I’ll have him come when he’s through.”

“Oh no, no, can’t afford—”

“Why—”

“And—they scare you so—he’d pretend I had pneumonia, like Sam’s sister—he’d frighten me so—I just have a summer cold. I—I’ll be all right to-morrow, deary. Oh no, no, please don’t, please don’t get a doctor. Can’t afford it—can’t—”

Pneumonia! At the word, which brought the sterile bitterness of winter into this fetid August room, Una was in a rigor of fear, yet galvanized with belief in her mother’s bravery. “My brave, brave little mother!” she thought.

Not till Una had promised that she would not summon the doctor was her mother quieted, though Una made the promise with reservations. She relieved the pain in her mother’s side with ice compresses—the ice chipped from the pitiful little cake in their tiny ice-box. She freshened pillows, she smoothed sheets; she made hot broth and bathed her mother’s shoulders with tepid water and rubbed her temples with menthol. But the fever increased, and at times Mrs. Golden broke through her shallow slumber with meaningless sentences, like the beginning of delirium.

At midnight she was panting more and more rapidly—three times as fast as normal breathing. She was sunk in a stupor. And Una, brooding by the bed, a crouched figure of mute tragedy in the low light, grew more and more apprehensive as her mother seemed to be borne away from her. Una started up. She would risk her mother’s displeasure and bring the doctor. Just then, even Doctor Smyth of the neighborhood practice and obstetrical habits seemed a miracle-worker.

She had to go four blocks to the nearest drug-store that would be open at this time of night, and there telephone the doctor.

She was aware that it was raining, for the fire-escape outside shone wet in the light from a window across the narrow court. She discovered she had left mackintosh and umbrella at the office. Stopping only to set out a clean towel, a spoon, and a glass on the chair by the bed, Una put on the old sweater which she secretly wore under her cheap thin jacket in winter. She lumbered wearily down-stairs. She prayed confusedly that God would give her back her headache and in reward make her mother well.

She was down-stairs at the heavy, grilled door. Rain was pouring. A light six stories up in the apartment-house across the street seemed infinitely distant and lonely, curtained from her by the rain. Water splashed in the street and gurgled in the gutters. It did not belong to the city as it would have belonged to brown woods or prairie. It was violent here, shocking and terrible. It took distinct effort for Una to wade out into it.

The modern city! Subway, asphalt, a wireless message winging overhead, and Una Golden, an office-woman in eye-glasses. Yet sickness and rain and night were abroad; and it was a clumsily wrapped peasant woman, bent-shouldered and heavily breathing, who trudged unprotected through the dark side-streets as though she were creeping along moorland paths. Her thought was dulled to everything but physical discomfort and the illness which menaced the beloved. Woman’s eternal agony for the sick of her family had transformed the trim smoothness of the office-woman’s face into wrinkles that were tragic and ruggedly beautiful.

§ 7

Again Una climbed the endless stairs to her flat. She unconsciously counted the beat of the weary, regular rhythm which her feet made on the slate treads and the landings—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, landing, turn and—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven—over and over. At the foot of the last flight she suddenly believed that her mother needed her this instant. She broke the regular thumping rhythm of her climb, dashed up, cried out at the seconds wasted in unlocking the door. She tiptoed into the bedroom—and found her mother just as she had left her. In Una’s low groan of gladness there was all the world’s self-sacrifice, all the fidelity to a cause or to a love. But as she sat unmoving she came to feel that her mother was not there; her being was not in this wreck upon the bed.

In an hour the doctor soothed his way into the flat. He “was afraid there might be just a little touch of pneumonia.” With breezy fatherliness which inspirited Una, he spoke of the possible presence of pneumococcus, of doing magic things with Romer’s serum, of trusting in God, of the rain, of cold baths and digitalin. He patted Una’s head and cheerily promised to return at dawn. He yawned and smiled at himself. He looked as roundly, fuzzily sleepy as a bunny rabbit, but in the quiet, forlorn room of night and illness he radiated trust in himself. Una said to herself, “He certainly must know what he is talking about.”

She was sure that the danger was over. She did not go to bed, however. She sat stiffly in the bedroom and planned amusements for her mother. She would work harder, earn more money. They would move to a cottage in the suburbs, where they would have chickens and roses and a kitten, and her mother would find neighborly people again.

Five days after, late on a bright, cool afternoon, when all the flats about them were thinking of dinner, her mother died.

§ 8

There was a certain madness in Una’s grief. Her agony was a big, simple, uncontrollable emotion, like the fanaticism of a crusader—alarming, it was, not to be reckoned with, and beautiful as a storm. Yet it was no more morbid than the little fits of rage with which a school-teacher relieves her cramped spirit. For the first time she had the excuse to exercise her full power of emotion.

Una evoked an image of her mother as one who had been altogether good, understanding, clever, and unfortunate. She regretted every moment she had spent away from her—remembered with scorn that she had planned to go to the theater the preceding Saturday, instead of sanctifying the time in the Nirvana of the beloved’s presence; repented with writhing agony having spoken harshly about neglected household duties.

She even contrived to find it a virtue in her mother that she had so often forgotten the daily tasks—her mind had been too fine for such things.... Una retraced their life. But she remembered everything only as one remembers under the sway of music.

“If I could just have another hour, just one hour with her, and feel her hands on my eyes again—”

On the night before the funeral she refused to let even Mrs. Sessions stay with her. She did not want to share her mother’s shadowy presence with any one.

She lay on the floor beside the bed where her mother was stately in death. It was her last chance to talk to her:

“Mother ... Mother ... Don’t you hear me? It’s Una calling. Can’t you answer me this one last time? Oh, mother, think, mother dear, I can’t ever hear your voice again if you don’t speak to me now.... Don’t you remember how we went home to Panama, our last vacation? Don’t you remember how happy we were down at the lake? Little mother, you haven’t forgotten, have you? Even if you don’t answer, you know I’m watching by you, don’t you? See, I’m kissing your hand. Oh, you did want me to sleep near you again, this last night— Oh, my God! oh, my God! the last night I shall ever spend with her, the very last, last night.”

All night long the thin voice came from the little white-clad figure so insignificant in the dimness, now lying motionless on the comforter she had spread beside the bed, and talking in a tone of ordinary conversation that was uncanny in this room of invisible whisperers; now leaping up to kiss the dead hand in a panic, lest it should already be gone.

The funeral filled the house with intruders. The drive to the cemetery was irritating. She wanted to leap out of the carriage. At first she concentrated on the cushion beside her till she thought of nothing in the world but the faded bottle-green upholstery, and a ridiculous drift of dust in the tufting. But some one was talking to her. (It was awkward Mr. Sessions, for shrewd Mrs. Sessions had the genius to keep still.) He kept stammering the most absurd platitudes about how happy her mother must be in a heaven regarding which he did not seem to have very recent or definite knowledge. She was annoyed, not comforted. She wanted to break away, to find her mother’s presence again in that sacred place where she had so recently lived and spoken.

Yet, when Una returned to the flat, something was gone. She tried to concentrate on thought about immortality. She found that she had absolutely no facts upon which to base her thought. The hundreds of good, sound, orthodox sermons she had heard gave her nothing but vague pictures of an eternal church supper somewhere in the clouds—nothing, blankly and terribly nothing, that answered her bewildered wonder as to what had become of the spirit which had been there and now was gone.

In the midst of her mingling of longing and doubt she realized that she was hungry, and she rather regretted having refused Mrs. Sessions’s invitation to dinner. She moved slowly about the kitchen.

The rheumatic old canary hobbled along the floor of his cage and tried to sing. At that Una wept, “She never will hear poor Dickie sing again.”

Instantly she remembered—as clearly as though she were actually listening to the voice and words—that her mother had burst out, “Drat that bird, it does seem as if every time I try to take a nap he just tries to wake me up.” Una laughed grimly. Hastily she reproved herself, “Oh, but mother didn’t mean—”

But in memory of that healthily vexed voice, it seemed less wicked to take notice of food, and after a reasonable dinner she put on her kimono and bedroom slippers, carefully arranged the pillows on the couch, and lay among them, meditating on her future.

For half an hour she was afire with an eager thought: “Why can’t I really make a success of business, now that I can entirely devote myself to it? There’s women—in real estate, and lawyers and magazine editors—some of them make ten thousand a year.”

So Una Golden ceased to live a small-town life in New York; so she became a genuine part of the world of offices; took thought and tried to conquer this new way of city-dwelling.

“Maybe I can find out if there’s anything in life—now—besides working for T. W. till I’m scrapped like an old machine,” she pondered. “How I hate letters about two-family houses in Flatbush!”

She dug her knuckles into her forehead in the effort to visualize the problem of the hopeless women in industry.

She was an Average Young Woman on a Job; she thought in terms of money and offices; yet she was one with all the men and women, young and old, who were creating a new age. She was nothing in herself, yet as the molecule of water belongs to the ocean, so Una Golden humbly belonged to the leaven who, however confusedly, were beginning to demand, “Why, since we have machinery, science, courage, need we go on tolerating war and poverty and caste and uncouthness, and all that sheer clumsiness?”

Part II
THE OFFICE

CHAPTER IX

THE effect of grief is commonly reputed to be noble. But mostly it is a sterile nobility. Witness the widows who drape their musty weeds over all the living; witness the mother of a son killed in war who urges her son’s comrades to bring mourning to the mothers of all the sons on the other side.

Grief is a paralyzing poison. It broke down Una’s resistance to the cares of the office. Hers was no wholesome labor in which she could find sacred forgetfulness. It was the round of unessentials which all office-women know so desperately well. She bruised herself by shrinking from those hourly insults to her intelligence; and outside the office her most absorbing comfort was in the luxury of mourning—passion in black, even to the black-edged face-veil.... Though she was human enough to realize that with her fair hair she looked rather well in mourning, and shrewd enough to get it on credit at excellent terms.

She was in the office all day, being as curtly exact as she could. But in the evening she sat alone in her flat and feared the city.

Sometimes she rushed down to the Sessionses’ flat, but the good people bored her with their assumption that she was panting to know all the news from Panama. She had drifted so far away from the town that the sixth assertion that “it was a great pity Kitty Wilson was going to marry that worthless Clark boy” aroused no interest in her. She was still more bored by their phonograph, on which they played over and over the same twenty records. She would make quick, unconvincing excuses about having to hurry away. Their slippered stupidity was a desecration of her mother’s memory.

Her half-hysterical fear of the city’s power was increased by her daily encounter with the clamorous streets, crowded elevators, frantic lunch-rooms, and, most of all, the experience of the Subway.

Amazing, incredible, the Subway, and the fact that human beings could become used to it, consent to spend an hour in it daily. There was a heroic side to this spectacle of steel trains clanging at forty miles an hour beneath twenty-story buildings. The engineers had done their work well, made a great thought in steel and cement. And then the business men and bureaucrats had made the great thought a curse. There was in the Subway all the romance which story-telling youth goes seeking: trains crammed with an inconceivable complexity of people—marquises of the Holy Roman Empire, Jewish factory hands, speculators from Wyoming, Iowa dairymen, quarreling Italian lovers, with their dramatic tales, their flux of every human emotion, under the city mask. But however striking these dramatic characters may be to the occasional spectator, they figure merely as an odor, a confusion, to the permanent serf of the Subway.... A long underground station, a catacomb with a cement platform, this was the chief feature of the city vista to the tired girl who waited there each morning. A clean space, but damp, stale, like the corridor to a prison—as indeed it was, since through it each morning Una entered the day’s business life.

Then, the train approaching, filling the tunnel, like a piston smashing into a cylinder; the shoving rush to get aboard. A crush that was ruffling and fatiguing to a man, but to a woman was horror.

Una stood with a hulking man pressing as close to her side as he dared, and a dapper clerkling squeezed against her breast. Above her head, to represent the city’s culture and graciousness, there were advertisements of soap, stockings, and collars. At curves the wheels ground with a long, savage whine, the train heeled, and she was flung into the arms of the grinning clerk, who held her tight. She, who must never be so unladylike as to enter a polling-place, had breathed into her very mouth the clerkling’s virile electoral odor of cigarettes and onions and decayed teeth.

A very good thing, the Subway. It did make Una quiver with the beginnings of rebellious thought as no suave preacher could ever have done. Almost hysterically she resented this daily indignity, which smeared her clean, cool womanhood with a grease of noise and smell and human contact.

As was the Subway, so were her noons of elbowing to get impure food in restaurants.

For reward she was permitted to work all day with Troy Wilkins. And for heavens and green earth, she had a chair and a desk.

But the human organism, which can modify itself to arctic cold and Indian heat, to incessant labor or the long enervation of luxury, learns to endure. Unwilling dressing, lonely breakfast, the Subway, dull work, lunch, sleepiness after lunch, the hopelessness of three o’clock, the boss’s ill-tempers, then the Subway again, and a lonely flat with no love, no creative work; and at last a long sleep so that she might be fresh for such another round of delight. So went the days. Yet all through them she found amusement, laughed now and then, and proved the heroism as well as the unthinking servility of the human race.

§ 2

The need of feeling that there were people near to her urged Una to sell her furniture and move from the flat to a boarding-house.

She avoided Mrs. Sessions’s advice. She was sure that Mrs. Sessions would bustle about and find her a respectable place where she would have to be cheery. She didn’t want to be cheery. She wanted to think. She even bought a serious magazine with articles. Not that she read it.

But she was afraid to be alone any more. Anyway, she would explore the city.

Of the many New Yorks, she had found only Morningside Park, Central Park, Riverside Drive, the shopping district, the restaurants and theaters which Walter had discovered to her, a few down-town office streets, and her own arid region of flats. She did not know the proliferating East Side, the factories, the endless semi-suburban stretches—nor Fifth Avenue. Her mother and Mrs. Sessions had inculcated in her the earnest idea that most parts of New York weren’t quite nice. In over two years in the city she had never seen a millionaire nor a criminal; she knew the picturesqueness neither of wealth nor of pariah poverty.

She did not look like an adventurer when, at a Saturday noon of October, she left the office—slight, kindly, rather timid, with her pale hair and school-teacher eye-glasses, and clear cheeks set off by comely mourning. But she was seizing New York. She said over and over, “Why, I can go and live any place I want to, and maybe I’ll meet some folks who are simply fascinating.” She wasn’t very definite about these fascinating folks, but they implied girls to play with and—she hesitated—and decidedly men, men different from Walter, who would touch her hand in courtly reverence.

She poked through strange streets. She carried an assortment of “Rooms and Board” clippings from the “want-ad” page of a newspaper, and obediently followed their hints about finding the perfect place. She resolutely did not stop at places not advertised in the paper, though nearly every house, in some quarters, had a sign, “Room to Rent.” Una still had faith in the veracity of whatever appeared in the public prints, as compared with what she dared see for herself.

The advertisements led her into a dozen parts of the city frequented by roomers, the lonely, gray, detached people who dwell in other people’s houses.

It was not so splendid a quest as she had hoped; it was too sharp a revelation of the cannon-food of the city, the people who had never been trained, and who had lost heart. It was scarcely possible to tell one street from another; to remember whether she was on Sixteenth Street or Twenty-sixth. Always the same rows of red-brick or brownstone houses, all alike, the monotony broken only by infrequent warehouses or loft-buildings; always the same doubtful mounting of stone steps, the same searching for a bell, the same waiting, the same slatternly, suspicious landlady, the same evil hallway with a brown hat-rack, a steel-engraving with one corner stained with yellow, a carpet worn through to the flooring in a large oval hole just in front of the stairs, a smell of cabbage, a lack of ventilation. Always the same desire to escape, though she waited politely while the landlady in the same familiar harsh voice went through the same formula.

Then, before she could flee to the comparatively fresh air of the streets, Una would politely have to follow the panting landlady to a room that was a horror of dirty carpet, lumpy mattress, and furniture with everything worn off that could wear off. And at last, always the same phrases by which Una meant to spare the woman: “Well, I’ll think it over. Thank you so much for showing me the rooms, but before I decide— Want to look around—”

Phrases which the landlady heard ten times a day.

She conceived a great-hearted pity for landladies. They were so patient, in face of her evident distaste. Even their suspiciousness was but the growling of a beaten dog. They sighed and closed their doors on her without much attempt to persuade her to stay. Her heart ached with their lack of imagination. They had no more imagination than those landladies of the insect world, the spiders, with their unchanging, instinctive, ancestral types of webs.

Her depression was increased by the desperate physical weariness of the hunt. Not that afternoon, not till two weeks later, did she find a room in a large, long, somber railroad flat on Lexington Avenue, conducted by a curly-haired young bookkeeper and his pretty wife, who provided their clients with sympathy, with extensive and scientific data regarding the motion-picture houses in the neighborhood, and board which was neither scientific nor very extensive.

It was time for Una to sacrifice the last material contact with her mother; to sell the furniture which she had known ever since, as a baby in Panama, she had crawled from this horsehair chair, all the long and perilous way across this same brown carpet, to this red-plush couch.

§ 3

It was not so hard to sell the furniture; she could even read and burn her father’s letters with an unhappy resoluteness. Despite her tenderness, Una had something of youth’s joy in getting rid of old things, as preparation for acquiring the new. She did sob when she found her mother’s straw hat, just as Mrs. Golden had left it, on the high shelf of the wardrobe as though her mother might come in at any minute, put it on, and start for a walk. She sobbed again when she encountered the tiny tear in the bottom of the couch, which her own baby fingers had made in trying to enlarge a pirate’s cave. That brought the days when her parents were immortal and all-wise; when the home sitting-room, where her father read the paper aloud, was a security against all the formidable world outside.

But to these recollections Una could shut her heart. To one absurd thing, because it was living, Una could not shut her heart—to the senile canary.

Possibly she could have taken it with her, but she felt confusedly that Dickie would not be appreciated in other people’s houses. She evaded asking the Sessionses to shelter the bird, because every favor that she permitted from that smug family was a bond that tied her to their life of married spinsterhood.

“Oh, Dickie, Dickie, what am I going to do with you?” she cried, slipping a finger through the wires of the cage.

The canary hopped toward her and tried to chirp his greeting.

“Even when you were sick you tried to sing to me, and mother did love you,” she sighed. “I just can’t kill you—trusting me like that.”

She turned her back, seeking to solve the problem by ignoring it. While she was sorting dresses—some trace of her mother in every fold, every wrinkle of the waists and lace collars—she was listening to the bird in the cage.

“I’ll think of some way—I’ll find somebody who will want you, Dickie dear,” she murmured, desperately, now and then.

After dinner and nightfall, with her nerves twanging all the more because it seemed silly to worry over one dissolute old bird when all her life was breaking up, she hysterically sprang up, snatched Dickie from the cage, and trotted down-stairs to the street.

“I’ll leave you somewhere. Somebody will find you,” she declared.

Concealing the bird by holding it against her breast with a hand supersensitive to its warm little feathers, she walked till she found a deserted tenement doorway. She hastily set the bird down on a stone balustrade beside the entrance steps. Dickie chirped more cheerily, more sweetly than for many days, and confidingly hopped back to her hand.

“Oh, I can’t leave him for boys to torture and I can’t take him, I can’t—”

In a sudden spasm she threw the bird into the air, and ran back to the flat, sobbing, “I can’t kill it—I can’t—there’s so much death.” Longing to hear the quavering affection of its song once more, but keeping herself from even going to the window, to look for it, with bitter haste she completed her work of getting rid of things—things—things—the things which were stones of an imprisoning past.

§ 4

Shyness was over Una when at last she was in the house of strangers. She sat marveling that this square, white cubby-hole of a room was hers permanently, that she hadn’t just come here for an hour or two. She couldn’t get it to resemble her first impression of it. Now the hallway was actually a part of her life—every morning she would face the picture of a magazine-cover girl when she came out of her room.

Her agitation was increased by the problem of keeping up the maiden modesty appropriate to a Golden, a young female friend of the Sessionses’, in a small flat with gentlemen lodgers and just one bathroom. Una was saved by not having a spinster friend with whom to share her shrinking modesty. She simply had to take waiting for her turn at the bathroom as a matter of course, and insensibly she was impressed by the decency with which these dull, ordinary people solved the complexities of their enforced intimacy. When she wildly clutched her virgin bathrobe about her and passed a man in the hall, he stalked calmly by without any of the teetering apologies which broad-beamed Mr. Sessions had learned from his genteel spouse.

She could not at first distinguish among her companions. Gradually they came to be distinct, important. They held numberless surprises for her. She would not have supposed that a bookkeeper in a fish-market would be likely to possess charm. Particularly if he combined that amorphous occupation with being a boarding-house proprietor. Yet her landlord, Herbert Gray, with his look of a track-athlete, his confessions of ignorance and his naïve enthusiasms about whatever in the motion pictures seemed to him heroic, large, colorful, was as admirable as the several youngsters of her town who had plodded through Princeton or Pennsylvania and come back to practise law or medicine or gentlemanly inheritance of business. And his wife, round and comely, laughing easily, wearing her clothes with an untutored grace which made her cheap waists smart, was so thoroughly her husband’s comrade in everything, that these struggling nobodies had all the riches of the earth.

The Grays took Una in as though she were their guest, but they did not bother her. They were city-born, taught by the city to let other people live their own lives.

The Grays had taken a flat twice too large for their own use. The other lodgers, who lived, like monks on a bare corridor, along the narrow “railroad” hall, were three besides Una:

A city failure, one with a hundred thousand failures, a gray-haired, neat man, who had been everything and done nothing, and who now said evasively that he was “in the collection business.” He read Dickens and played a masterful game of chess. He liked to have it thought that his past was brave with mysterious splendors. He spoke hintingly of great lawyers. But he had been near to them only as a clerk for a large law firm. He was grateful to any one for noticing him. Like most of the failures, he had learned the art of doing nothing at all. All Sunday, except for a two hours’ walk in Central Park, and one game of chess with Herbert Gray, he dawdled in his room, slept, regarded his stocking-feet with an appearance of profound meditation, yawned, picked at the Sunday newspaper. Una once saw him napping on a radiant autumn Sunday afternoon, and detested him. But he was politely interested in her work for Troy Wilkins, carefully exact in saying, “Good-morning, miss,” and he became as familiar to her as the gas-heater in her cubicle.

Second fellow-lodger was a busy, reserved woman, originally from Kansas City, who had something to do with some branch library. She had solved the problems of woman’s lack of place in this city scheme by closing tight her emotions, her sense of adventure, her hope of friendship. She never talked to Una, after discovering that Una had no interesting opinions on the best reading for children nine to eleven.

These gentle, inconsequential city waifs, the Grays, the failure, the library-woman, meant no more to Una than the crowds who were near, yet so detached, in the streets. But the remaining boarder annoyed her by his noisy whine. He was an underbred maverick, with sharp eyes of watery blue, a thin mustache, large teeth, and no chin worth noticing. He would bounce in of an evening, when the others were being decorous and dull in the musty dining-room, and yelp: “How do we all find our seskpadalian selves this bright and balmy evenin’? How does your perspegacity discipulate, Herby? What’s the good word, Miss Golden? Well, well, well, if here ain’t our good old friend, the Rev. J. Pilkington Corned Beef; how ’r’ you, Pilky? Old Mrs. Cabbage feelin’ well, too? Well, well, still discussing the movies, Herby? Got any new opinions about Mary Pickford? Well, well. Say, I met another guy that’s as nutty as you, Herby; he thinks that Wilhelm Jenkins Bryan is a great statesman. Let’s hear some more about the Sage of Free Silver, Herby.”

The little man was never content till he had drawn them into so bitter an argument that some one would rise, throw down a napkin, growl, “Well, if that’s all you know about it—if you’re all as ignorant as that, you simply ain’t worth arguing with,” and stalk out. When general topics failed, the disturber would catechize the library-woman about Louisa M. Alcott, or the failure about his desultory inquiries into Christian Science, or Mrs. Gray about the pictures plastering the dining-room—a dozen spiritual revelations of apples and oranges, which she had bought at a department-store sale.

The maverick’s name was Fillmore J. Benson. Strangers called him Benny, but his more intimate acquaintances, those to whom he had talked for at least an hour, were requested to call him Phil. He made a number of pretty puns about his first name. He was, surprisingly, a doctor—not the sort that studies science, but the sort that studies the gullibility of human nature—a “Doctor of Manipulative Osteology.” He had earned a diploma by a correspondence course, and had scrabbled together a small practice among retired shopkeepers. He was one of the strange, impudent race of fakers who prey upon the clever city. He didn’t expect any one at the Grays’ to call him a “doctor.”

He drank whisky and gambled for pennies, was immoral in his relations with women and as thick-skinned as he was blatant. He had been a newsboy, a contractor’s clerk, and climbed up by the application of his wits. He read enormously—newspapers, cheap magazines, medical books; he had an opinion about everything, and usually worsted every one at the Grays’ in arguments. And he did his patients good by giving them sympathy and massage. He would have been an excellent citizen had the city not preferred to train him, as a child in its reeling streets, to a sharp unscrupulousness.

Una was at first disgusted by Phil Benson, then perplexed. He would address her in stately Shakespearean phrases which, as a boy, he had heard from the gallery of the Academy of Music. He would quote poetry at her. She was impressed when he almost silenced the library-woman, in an argument as to whether Longfellow or Whittier was the better poet, by parroting the whole of “Snow Bound.”

She fancied that Phil’s general pea-weevil aspect concealed the soul of a poet. But she was shocked out of her pleasant fabling when Phil roared at Mrs. Gray: “Say, what did the baker use this pie for? A bureau or a trunk? I’ve found three pairs of socks and a safety-pin in my slab, so far.”

Pretty Mrs. Gray was hurt and indignant, while her husband growled: “Aw, don’t pay any attention to that human phonograph, Amy. He’s got bats in his belfry.”

Una had acquired a hesitating fondness for the mute gentleness of the others, and it infuriated her that this insect should spoil their picnic. But after dinner Phil Benson dallied over to her, sat on the arm of her chair, and said: “I’m awfully sorry that I make such a bum hit with you, Miss Golden. Oh, I can see I do, all right. You’re the only one here that can understand. Somehow it seems to me—you aren’t like other women I know. There’s something—somehow it’s different. A—a temperament. You dream about higher things than just food and clothes. Oh,” he held up a deprecating hand, “don’t deny it. I’m mighty serious about it, Miss Golden. I can see it, even if you haven’t waked up to it as yet.”

The absurd part of it was that, at least while he was talking, Mr. Phil Benson did believe what he was saying, though he had borrowed all of his sentiments from a magazine story about hobohemians which he had read the night before.

He also spoke of reading good books, seeing good plays, and the lack of good influences in this wicked city.

He didn’t overdo it. He took leave in ten minutes—to find good influences in a Kelly pool-parlor on Third Avenue. He returned to his room at ten, and, sitting with his shoeless feet cocked up on his bed, read a story in Racy Yarns. While beyond the partition, about four feet from him, Una Golden lay in bed, her smooth arms behind her aching head, and worried about Phil’s lack of opportunity.

She was finding in his loud impudence a twisted resemblance to Walter Babson’s erratic excitability, and that won her, for love goes seeking new images of the god that is dead.

Next evening Phil varied his tactics by coming to dinner early, just touching Una’s hand as she was going into the dining-room, and murmuring in a small voice, “I’ve been thinking so much of the helpful things you said last evening, Miss Golden.”

Later, Phil talked to her about his longing to be a great surgeon—in which he had the tremendous advantage of being almost sincere. He walked down the hall to her room, and said good-night lingeringly, holding her hand.

Una went into her room, closed the door, and for full five minutes stood amazed. “Why!” she gasped, “the little man is trying to make love to me!”

She laughed over the absurdity of it. Heavens! She had her Ideal. The Right Man. He would probably be like Walter Babson—though more dependable. But whatever the nature of the paragon, he would in every respect be just the opposite of the creature who had been saying good-night to her.

She sat down, tried to read the paper, tried to put Phil out of her mind. But he kept returning. She fancied that she could hear his voice in the hall. She dropped the paper to listen.

“I’m actually interested in him!” she marveled. “Oh, that’s ridiculous!”

§ 5

Now that Walter had made a man’s presence natural to her, Una needed a man, the excitation of his touch, the solace of his voice. She could not patiently endure a cloistered vacuousness.

Even while she was vigorously representing to herself that he was preposterous, she was uneasily aware that Phil was masculine. His talons were strong; she could feel their clutch on her hands. “He’s a rat. And I do wish he wouldn’t—spit!” she shuddered. But under her scorn was a surge of emotion.... A man, not much of a man, yet a man, had wanted the contact of her hand, been eager to be with her. Sensations vast as night or the ocean whirled in her small, white room. Desire, and curiosity even more, made her restless as a wave.

She caught herself speculating as she plucked at the sleeve of her black mourning waist: “I wonder would I be more interesting if I had the orange-and-brown dress I was going to make when mother died?... Oh, shame!”

Yet she sprang up from the white-enameled rocker, tucked in her graceless cotton corset-cover, stared at her image in the mirror, smoothed her neck till the skin reddened.

§ 6

Phil talked to her for an hour after their Sunday-noon dinner. She had been to church; had confessed indeterminate sins to a formless and unresponsive deity. She felt righteous, and showed it. Phil caught the cue. He sacrificed all the witty things he was prepared to say about Mrs. Gray’s dumplings; he gazed silently out of the window till she wondered what he was thinking about, then he stumblingly began to review a sermon which he said he had heard the previous Sunday—though he must have been mistaken, as he shot several games of Kelly pool every Sunday morning, or slept till noon.

“The preacher spoke of woman’s influence. You don’t know what it is to lack a woman’s influence in a fellow’s life, Miss Golden. I can see the awful consequences among my patients. I tell you, when I sat there in church and saw the colored windows—” He sighed portentously. His hand fell across hers—his lean paw, strong and warm-blooded from massaging puffy old men. “I tell you I just got sentimental, I did, thinking of all I lacked.”

Phil melted mournfully away—to indulge in a highly cheerful walk on upper Broadway with Miss Becky Rosenthal, sewer for the Sans Peur Pants and Overalls Company—while in her room Una grieved over his forlorn desire to be good.

§ 7

Two evenings later, when November warmed to a passing Indian summer of golden skies that were pitifully far away from the little folk in city streets, Una was so restless that she set off for a walk by herself.

Phil had been silent, glancing at her and away, as though he were embarrassed.

“I wish I could do something to help him,” she thought, as she poked down-stairs to the entrance of the apartment-house.

Phil was on the steps, smoking a cigarette-sized cigar, scratching his chin, and chattering with his kinsmen, the gutter sparrows.

He doffed his derby. He spun his cigar from him with a deft flip of his fingers which somehow agitated her. She called herself a little fool for being agitated, but she couldn’t get rid of the thought that only men snapped their fingers like that.

“Goin’ to the movies, Miss Golden?”

“No, I was just going for a little walk.”

“Well, say, walks, that’s where I live. Why don’t you invite Uncle Phil to come along and show you the town? Why, I knew this burg when they went picnicking at the reservoir in Bryant Park.”

He swaggered beside her without an invitation. He did not give her a chance to decline his company—and soon she did not want to. He led her down to Gramercy Park, loveliest memory of village days, houses of a demure red and white ringing a fenced garden. He pointed out to her the Princeton Club, the Columbia Club, the National Arts, and the Players’, and declared that two men leaving the last were John Drew and the most famous editor in America. He guided her over to Stuyvesant Park, a barren square out of old London, with a Quaker school on one side, and the voluble Ghetto on the other. He conducted her through East Side streets, where Jewish lovers parade past miles of push-carts and venerable Rabbis read the Talmud between sales of cotton socks, and showed her a little café which was a hang-out for thieves. She was excited by this contact with the underworld.

He took her to a Lithuanian restaurant, on a street which was a débâcle. One half of the restaurant was filled with shaggy Lithuanians playing cards at filthy tables; the other half was a clean haunt for tourists who came to see the slums, and here, in the heart of these “slums,” saw only one another.

“Wait a while,” Phil said, “and a bunch of Seeing-New-Yorkers will land here and think we’re crooks.”

In ten minutes a van-load of sheepish trippers from the Middle West filed into the restaurant and tried to act as though they were used to cocktails. Una was delighted when she saw them secretly peering at Phil and herself; she put one hand on her thigh and one on the table, leaned forward and tried to look tough, while Phil pretended to be quarreling with her, and the trippers’ simple souls were enthralled by this glimpse of two criminals. Una really enjoyed the acting; for a moment Phil was her companion in play; and when the trippers had gone rustling out to view other haunts of vice she smiled at Phil unrestrainedly.

Instantly he took advantage of her smile, of their companionship.

He was really as simple-hearted as the trippers in his tactics.

She had been drinking ginger-ale. He urged her now to “have a real drink.” He muttered confidentially: “Have a nip of sherry or a New Orleans fizz or a Bronx. That’ll put heart into you. Not enough to affect you a-tall, but just enough to cheer up on. Then we’ll go to a dance and really have a time. Gee! poor kid, you don’t get any fun.”

“No, no, I never touch it,” she said, and she believed it, forgetting the claret she had drunk with Walter Babson.

She felt unsafe.

He laughed at her; assured her from his medical experience that “lots of women need a little tonic,” and boisterously ordered a glass of sherry for her.

She merely sipped it. She wanted to escape. All their momentary frankness of association was gone. She feared him; she hated the complaisant waiter who brought her the drink; the fat proprietor who would take his pieces of silver, though they were the price of her soul; the policeman on the pavement, who would never think of protecting her; and the whole hideous city which benignly profited by saloons. She watched another couple down at the end of the room—an obese man and a young, pretty girl, who was hysterically drunk. Not because she had attended the Women’s Christian Temperance Union at Panama and heard them condemn “the demon rum,” but because the sickish smell of the alcohol was all about her now, she suddenly turned into a crusader. She sprang up, seized her gloves, snapped, “I will not touch the stuff.” She marched down the room, out of the restaurant and away, not once looking back at Phil.

In about fifteen seconds she had a humorous picture of Phil trying to rush after her, but stopped by the waiter to pay his check. She began to wonder if she hadn’t been slightly ridiculous in attempting to slay Demon Rum by careering down the restaurant. But “I don’t care!” she said, stoutly. “I’m glad I took a stand instead of just rambling along and wondering what it was all about, the way I did with Walter.”

Phil caught up to her and instantly began to complain. “Say, you certainly made a sight out of yourself—and out of me—leaving me sitting there with the waiter laughing his boob head off at me. Lord! I’ll never dare go near the place again.”

“Your own fault.” This problem was so clear, so unconfused to her.

“It wasn’t all my fault,” he said. “You didn’t have to take a drink.” His voice fell to a pathetic whimper. “I was showing you hospitality the best way I knew how. You won’t never know how you hurt my feelin’s.”

The problem instantly became complicated again. Perhaps she had hurt his rudimentary sense of courtesy. Perhaps Walter Babson would have sympathized with Phil, not with her. She peeped at Phil. He trailed along with a forlorn baby look which did not change.

She was very uncomfortable as she said a brief good-night at the flat. She half wished that he would give her a chance to recant. She saw him and his injured feelings as enormously important.

She undressed in a tremor of misgiving. She put her thin, pretty kimono over her nightgown, braided her hair, and curled on the bed, condemning herself for having been so supercilious to the rat who had never had a chance.

It was late—long after eleven—when there was a tapping on the door.

She started, listened rigidly.

Phil’s voice whispered from the hall: “Open your door just half an inch, Miss Golden. Something I wanted to say.”

Her pity for him made his pleading request like a command. She drew her kimono close and peeped out at him.

“I knew you were up,” he whispered; “saw the light under your door. I been so worried. I didn’t mean to shock you, or nothing, but if you feel I did mean to, I want to apologize. Gee! me, I couldn’t sleep one wink if I thought you was offended.”

“It’s all right—” she began.

“Say, come into the dining-room. Everybody gone to bed. I want to explain—gee! you gotta give me a chance to be good. If you don’t use no good influence over me, nobody never will, I guess.”

His whisper was full of masculine urgency, husky, bold. She shivered. She hesitated, did not answer.

“All right,” he mourned. “I don’t blame you none, but it’s pretty hard—”

“I’ll come just for a moment,” she said, and shut the door.

She was excited, flushed. She wrapped her braids around her head, gentle braids of pale gold, and her undistinguished face, thus framed, was young and sweet.

She hastened out to the dining-room.

What was the “parlor” by day the Grays used for their own bedroom, but the dining-room had a big, ugly, leather settee and two rockers, and it served as a secondary living-room.

Here Phil waited, at the end of the settee. She headed for a rocker, but he piled sofa-cushions for her at the other end of the settee, and she obediently sank down there.

“Listen,” he said, in a tone of lofty lamentation, “I don’t know as I can ever, ever make you understand I just wanted to give you a good time. I seen you was in mourning, and I thinks, ‘Maybe you could brighten her up a little—’”

“I am sorry I didn’t understand.”

“Una, Una! Do you suppose you could ever stoop to helping a bad egg like me?” he demanded.

His hand fell on hers. It comforted her chilly hand. She let it lie there. Speech became difficult for her.

“Why, why yes—” she stammered.

In reaction to her scorn of him, she was all accepting faith.

“Oh, if you could—and if I could make you less lonely sometimes—”

In his voice was a perilous tenderness; for the rat, trained to beguile neurotic patients in his absurd practice, could croon like the very mother of pity.

“Yes, I am lonely sometimes,” she heard herself admitting—far-off, dreaming, needing the close affection that her mother and Walter had once given her.

“Poor little girl—you’re so much better raised and educated than me, but you got to have friendship jus’ same.”

His arm was about her shoulder. For a second she leaned against him.

All her scorn of him suddenly gathered in one impulse. She sprang up—just in time to catch a grin on his face.

“You gutter-rat!” she said. “You aren’t worth my telling you what you are. You wouldn’t understand. You can’t see anything but the gutter.”

He was perfectly unperturbed: “Poor stuff, kid. Weak come-back. Sounds like a drayma. But, say, listen, honest, kid, you got me wrong. What’s the harm in a little hugging—”

She fled. She was safe in her room. She stood with both arms outstretched. She did not feel soiled by this dirty thing. She was triumphant. In the silhouette of a water-tank, atop the next-door apartment-house, she saw a strong tower of faith.

“Now I don’t have to worry about him. I don’t have to make any more decisions. I know! I’m through! No one can get me just because of curiosity about sex again. I’m free. I can fight my way through in business and still keep clean. I can! I was hungry for—for even that rat. I—Una Golden! Yes, I was. But I don’t want to go back to him. I’ve won!

“Oh, Walter, Walter, I do want you, dear, but I’ll get along without you, and I’ll keep a little sacred image of you.”

CHAPTER X

THE three-fourths of Una employed in the office of Mr. Troy Wilkins was going through one of those periods of unchanging routine when all past drama seems unreal, when nothing novel happens nor apparently ever will happen—such a time of dull peacefulness as makes up the major part of our lives.

Her only definite impressions were the details of daily work, the physical aspects of the office, and the presence of the “Boss.”

§ 2

Day after day the same details of the job: letters arriving, assorted, opened, answered by dictation, the answers sealed and stamped (and almost every day the same panting crisis of getting off some cosmically important letter).... The reception of callers; welcome to clients; considerate but firm assurances to persons looking for positions that there was “no opening just at present—” The suave answering of irritating telephone calls.... The filing of letters and plans; the clipping of real-estate-transfer items from newspapers.... The supervision of Bessie Kraker and the office-boy.

Equally fixed were the details of the grubby office itself. Like many men who have pride in the smartest suburban homes available, Mr. Wilkins was content with an office shabby and inconvenient. He regarded beautiful offices as in some way effeminate.... His wasn’t effeminate; it was undecorative as a filled ash-tray, despite Una’s daily following up of the careless scrubwomen with dust-cloth and whisk. She knew every inch of it, as a gardener knows his plot. She could never keep from noticing and running her finger along the pebbled glass of the oak-and-glass partition about Mr. Wilkins’s private office, each of the hundreds of times a day she passed it; and when she lay awake at midnight, her finger-tips would recall precisely the feeling of that rough surface, even to the sharp edges of a tiny flaw in the glass over the bookcase.

Or she would recall the floor-rag—symbol of the hard realness of the office grind....

It always hung over the twisted, bulbous lead pipes below the stationary basin in the women’s wash-room provided by the Septimus Building for the women on three floors. It was a rag ancient and slate-gray, grotesquely stiff and grotesquely hairy at its frayed edges—a corpse of a scrub-rag in rigor mortis. Una was annoyed with herself for ever observing so unlovely an object, but in the moment of relaxation when she went to wash her hands she was unduly sensitive to that eternal rag, and to the griminess of the wash-room—the cracked and yellow-stained wash-bowl, the cold water that stung in winter, the roller-towel which she spun round and round in the effort to find a dry, clean, square space, till, in a spasm of revulsion, she would bolt out of the wash-room with her face and hands half dried.

Woman’s place is in the home. Una was doubtless purely perverse in competing with men for the commercial triumphs of running that gray, wet towel round and round on its clattering roller, and of wondering whether for the entire remainder of her life she would see that dead scrub-rag.

It was no less annoying a fact that Bessie and she had only one waste-basket, which was invariably at Bessie’s desk when Una reached for it.

Or that the door of the supply-cupboard always shivered and stuck.

Or that on Thursday, which is the three P.M. of the week, it seemed impossible to endure the tedium till Saturday noon; and that, invariably, her money was gone by Friday, so that Friday lunch was always a mere insult to her hunger, and she could never get her gloves from the cleaner till after Saturday pay-day.

Una knew the office to a point where it offered few beautiful surprises.

And she knew the tactics of Mr. Troy Wilkins.

All managers—“bosses”—“chiefs”—have tactics for keeping discipline; tricks which they conceive as profoundly hidden from their underlings, and which are intimately known and discussed by those underlings.... There are the bosses who “bluff,” those who lie, those who give good-fellowship or grave courtesy in lieu of wages. None of these was Mr. Wilkins. He was dully honest and clumsily paternal. But he was a roarer, a grumbler; he bawled and ordained, in order to encourage industry and keep his lambs from asking for “raises.” Thus also he tried to conceal his own mistakes; when a missing letter for which everybody had been anxiously searching was found on his own desk, instead of in the files, he would blare, “Well, why didn’t you tell me you put it on my desk, heh?” He was a delayer also and, in poker patois, a passer of the buck. He would feebly hold up a decision for weeks, then make a whole campaign of getting his office to rush through the task in order to catch up; have a form of masculine-commuter hysterics because Una and Bessie didn’t do the typing in a miraculously short time.... He never cursed; he was an ecclesiastical believer that one of the chief aims of man is to keep from saying those mystic words “hell” and “damn”; but he could make “darn it” and “why in tunket” sound as profane as a gambling-den.... There was included in Una’s duties the pretense of believing that Mr. Wilkins was the greatest single-handed villa architect in Greater New York. Sometimes it nauseated her. But often he was rather pathetic in his shaky desire to go on having faith in his superseded ability, and she would willingly assure him that his rivals, the boisterous young firm of Soule, Smith & Fissleben, were frauds.

All these faults and devices of Mr. Troy Wilkins Una knew. Doubtless he would have been astonished to hear that fact, on evenings in his plate-racked, much-raftered, highly built-in suburban dining-room, when he discoursed to the admiring Mrs. Wilkins and the mouse-like little Wilkinses on the art of office discipline; or mornings in the second smoker of the 8.16 train, when he told the other lords of the world that “these stenographers are all alike—you simply can’t get’em to learn system.”

It is not recorded whether Mr. Wilkins also knew Una’s faults—her habit of falling a-dreaming at 3.30 and trying to make it up by working furiously at 4.30; her habit of awing the good-hearted Bessie Kraker by posing as a nun who had never been kissed nor ever wanted to be; her graft of sending the office-boy out for ten-cent boxes of cocoanut candy; and a certain resentful touchiness and ladylikeness which made it hard to give her necessary orders. Mr. Wilkins has never given testimony, but he is not the villain of the tale, and some authorities have a suspicion that he did not find Una altogether perfect.

§ 3

It must not be supposed that Una or her million sisters in business were constantly and actively bored by office routine.

Save once or twice a week, when he roared, and once or twice a month, when she felt that thirteen dollars a week was too little, she rather liked Mr. Wilkins—his honesty, his desire to make comfortable homes for people, his cheerful “Good-morning!” his way of interrupting dictation to tell her antiquated but jolly stories, his stolid, dependable-looking face.

She had real satisfaction in the game of work—in winning points and tricks in doing her work briskly and well, in helping Mr. Wilkins to capture clients. She was eager when she popped in to announce to him that a wary, long-pursued “prospect” had actually called. She was rather more interested in her day’s work than are the average of meaningless humanity who sell gingham and teach algebra and cure boils and repair lawn-mowers, because she was daily more able to approximate perfection, to look forward to something better—to some splendid position at twenty or even twenty-five dollars a week. She was certainly in no worse plight than perhaps ninety-five million of her free and notoriously red-blooded fellow-citizens.

But she was in no better plight. There was no drama, no glory in affection, nor, so long as she should be tied to Troy Wilkins’s dwindling business, no immediate increase in power. And the sameness, the unceasing discussions with Bessie regarding Mr. Wilkins—Mr. Wilkins’s hat, Mr. Wilkins’s latest command, Mr. Wilkins’s lost fountain-pen, Mr. Wilkins’s rudeness to the salesman for the Sky-line Roofing Company, Mr. Wilkins’s idiotic friendship for Muldoon, the contractor, Mr. Wilkins’s pronounced unfairness to the office-boy in regard to a certain lateness in arrival—

At best, Una got through day after day; at worst, she was as profoundly bored as an explorer in the arctic night.

§ 4

Una, the initiate New-Yorker, continued her study of city ways and city currents during her lunch-hours. She went down to Broad Street to see the curb market; marveled at the men with telephones in little coops behind opened windows; stared at the great newspaper offices on Park Row, the old City Hall, the mingling on lower Broadway of sky-challenging buildings with the history of pre-Revolutionary days. She got a momentary prejudice in favor of socialism from listening to an attack upon it by a noon-time orator—a spotted, badly dressed man whose favorite slur regarding socialists was that they were spotted and badly dressed. She heard a negro shouting dithyrambics about some religion she could never make out.

Sometimes she lunched at a newspaper-covered desk, with Bessie and the office-boy, on cold ham and beans and small, bright-colored cakes which the boy brought in from a bakery. Sometimes she had boiled eggs and cocoa at a Childs restaurant with stenographers who ate baked apples, rich Napoleons, and, always, coffee. Sometimes at a cafeteria, carrying a tray, she helped herself to crackers and milk and sandwiches. Sometimes at the Arden Tea Room, for women only, she encountered charity-workers and virulently curious literary ladies, whom she endured for the marked excellence of the Arden chicken croquettes. Sometimes Bessie tempted her to a Chinese restaurant, where Bessie, who came from the East Side and knew a trick or two, did not order chop-suey, like a tourist, but noodles and eggs foo-young.

In any case, the lunch-hour and the catalogue of what she was so vulgar as to eat were of importance in Una’s history, because that hour broke the routine, gave her for an hour a deceptive freedom of will, of choice between Boston beans and—New York beans. And her triumphant common sense was demonstrated, for she chose light, digestible food, and kept her head clear for the afternoon, while her overlord, Mr. Troy Wilkins, like vast numbers of his fellow business men, crammed himself with beefsteak-and-kidney pudding, drugged himself with cigar smoke and pots of strong coffee and shop-talk, spoke earnestly of the wickedness of drunkenness, and then, drunk with food and tobacco and coffee and talk, came back dizzy, blur-eyed, slow-nerved; and for two hours tried to get down to work.

After hours of trudging through routine, Una went home.

She took the Elevated now instead of the Subway. That was important in her life. It meant an entire change of scenery.

On the Elevated, beside her all evening, hovering over her bed at night, was Worry.

“Oh, I ought to have got all that Norris correspondence copied to-day. I must get at it first thing in the morning.... I wonder if Mr. Wilkins was sore because I stayed out so long for lunch?... What would I do if I were fired?”

So would she worry as she left the office. In the evening she wouldn’t so much criticize herself as suddenly and without reason remember office settings and incidents—startle at a picture of the T-square at which she had stared while Mr. Wilkins was telephoning.... She wasn’t weary because she worried; she worried because she was weary from the airless, unnatural, straining life. She worried about everything available, from her soul to her finger-nails; but the office offered the largest number of good opportunities.

“After all,” say the syndicated philosophers, “the office takes only eight or nine hours a day. The other fifteen or sixteen, you are free to do as you wish—loaf, study, become an athlete.” This illuminative suggestion is usually reinforced by allusions to Lincoln and Edison.

Only—you aren’t a Lincoln or an Edison, for the most part, and you don’t do any of those improving things. You have the office with you, in you, every hour of the twenty-four, unless you sleep dreamlessly and forget—which you don’t. Probably, like Una, you do not take any exercise to drive work-thoughts away.

She often planned to take exercise regularly; read of it in women’s magazines. But she could never get herself to keep up the earnest clowning of bedroom calisthenics; gymnasiums were either reekingly crowded or too expensive—and even to think of undressing and dressing for a gymnasium demanded more initiative than was left in her fagged organism. There was walking—but city streets become tiresomely familiar. Of sports she was consistently ignorant.

So all the week she was in the smell and sound of the battle, until Saturday evening with its blessed rest—the clean, relaxed time which every woman on the job knows.

Saturday evening! No work to-morrow! A prospect of thirty-six hours of freedom. A leisurely dinner, a languorous slowness in undressing, a hot bath, a clean nightgown, and fresh, smooth bed-linen. Una went to bed early to enjoy the contemplation of these luxuries. She even put on a lace bed-cap adorned with pink silk roses. The pleasure of relaxing in bed, of looking lazily at the pictures in a new magazine, of drifting into slumber—not of stepping into a necessary sleep that was only the anteroom of another day’s labor....

Such was her greatest joy in this period of uneventfulness.

§ 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.

CHAPTER XI

I’M tired of the Grays. They’re very nice people, but they can’t talk,” said Una to Bessie Kraker, at lunch in the office, on a February day.

“How do yuh mean ‘can’t talk’? Are they dummies?” inquired Bessie.

“Dummies?”

“Yuh, sure, deef and dumb.”

“Why, no, I mean they don’t talk my language—they don’t, oh, they don’t, I suppose you’d say ‘conversationalize.’ Do you see?”

“Oh yes,” said Bessie, doubtfully. “Say, listen, Miss Golden. Say, I don’t want to butt in, and maybe you wouldn’t be stuck on it much, but they say it’s a dead-swell place to live—Miss Kitson, the boss’s secretary where I was before, lived there—”

“Say, for the love o’ Mike, say it: Where?” interrupted the office-boy.

“You shut your nasty trap. I was just coming to it. The Temperance and Protection Home, on Madison Avenue just above Thirty-fourth. They say it’s kind of strict, but, gee! there’s a’ ausgezeichnet bunch of dames there, artists and everything, and they say they feed you swell, and it only costs eight bucks a week.”

“Well, maybe I’ll look at it,” said Una, dubiously.

Neither the forbidding name nor Bessie’s moral recommendation made the Home for Girls sound tempting, but Una was hungry for companionship; she was cold now toward the unvarying, unimaginative desires of men. Among the women “artists and everything” she might find the friends she needed.

The Temperance and Protection Home Club for Girls was in a solemn, five-story, white sandstone structure with a severe doorway of iron grill, solid and capable-looking as a national bank. Una rang the bell diffidently. She waited in a hall that, despite its mission settee and red-tiled floor, was barrenly clean as a convent. She was admitted to the business-like office of Mrs. Harriet Fike, the matron of the Home.

Mrs. Fike had a brown, stringy neck and tan bangs. She wore a mannish coat and skirt, flat shoes of the kind called “sensible” by everybody except pretty women, and a large silver-mounted crucifix.

“Well?” she snarled.

“Some one— I’d like to find out about coming here to live—to see the place, and so on. Can you have somebody show me one of the rooms?”

“My dear young lady, the first consideration isn’t to ‘have somebody show you’ or anybody else a room, but to ascertain if you are a fit person to come here.”

Mrs. Fike jabbed at a compartment of her desk, yanked out a corduroy-bound book, boxed its ears, slammed it open, glared at Una in a Christian and Homelike way, and began to shoot questions:

“Whatcha name?”

“Una Golden.”

“Miss uh Miss?”

“I didn’t quite—”

“Miss or Mrs., I said. Can’t you understand English?”

“See here, I’m not being sent to jail that I know of!” Una rose, tremblingly.

Mrs. Fike merely waited and snapped: “Sit down. You look as though you had enough sense to understand that we can’t let people we don’t know anything about enter a decent place like this.... Miss or Mrs., I said?”

“Miss,” Una murmured, feebly sitting down again.

“What’s your denomination?... No agnostics or Catholics allowed!”

Una heard herself meekly declaring, “Methodist.”

“Smoke? Swear? Drink liquor? Got any bad habits?”

“No!”

“Got a lover, sweetheart, gentleman friend? If so, what name or names?”

“No.”

“That’s what they all say. Let me tell you that later, when you expect to have all these male cousins visit you, we’ll reserve the privilege to ask questions.... Ever served a jail sentence?”

“Now really—! Do I look it?”

“My dear miss, wouldn’t you feel foolish if I said ‘yes’? Have you? I warn you we look these things up!”

“No, I have not.”

“Well, that’s comforting.... Age?”

“Twenty-six.”

“Parents living? Name nearest relatives? Nearest friends? Present occupation?”

Even as she answered this last simple question and Mrs. Fike’s suspicious query about her salary, Una felt as though she were perjuring herself, as though there were no such place as Troy Wilkins’s office—and Mrs. Fike knew it; as though a large policeman were secreted behind the desk and would at any moment pop out and drag her off to jail. She answered with tremorous carefulness. By now, the one thing that she wanted to do was to escape from that Christian and strictly supervised Napoleon, Mrs. Fike, and flee back to the Grays.

“Previous history?” Mrs. Fike was grimly continuing, and she followed this question by ascertaining Una’s ambitions, health, record for insanity, and references.

Mrs. Fike closed the query-book, and observed:

“Well, you are rather fresh, but you seem to be acceptable—and now you may look us over and see whether we are acceptable to you. Don’t think for one moment that this institution needs you, or is trying to lift you out of a life of sin, or that we suppose this to be the only place in New York to live. We know what we want—we run things on a scientific basis—but we aren’t so conceited as to think that everybody likes us. Now, for example, I can see that you don’t like me and my ways one bit. But Lord love you, that isn’t necessary. The one thing necessary is for me to run this Home according to the book, and if you’re fool enough to prefer a slap-dash boarding-house to this hygienic Home, why, you’ll make your bed—or rather some slattern of a landlady will make it—and you can lie in it. Come with me. No; first read the rules.”

Una obediently read that the young ladies of the Temperance Home were forbidden to smoke, make loud noises, cook, or do laundry in their rooms, sit up after midnight, entertain visitors “of any sort except mothers and sisters” in any place in the Home, “except in the parlors for that purpose provided.” They were not permitted to be out after ten unless their names were specifically entered in the “Out-late Book” before their going. And they were “requested to answer all reasonable questions of matron, or board of visitors, or duly qualified inspectors, regarding moral, mental, physical, and commercial well-being and progress.”

Una couldn’t resist asking, “I suppose it isn’t forbidden to sleep in our rooms, is it?”

Mrs. Fike looked over her, through her, about her, and remarked: “I’d advise you to drop all impudence. You see, you don’t do it well. We admit East Side Jews here and they are so much quicker and wittier than you country girls from Pennsylvania and Oklahoma, and Heaven knows where, that you might just as well give up and try to be ladies instead of humorists. Come, we will take a look at the Home.”

By now Una was resolved not to let Mrs. Fike drive her away. She would “show her”; she would “come and live here just for spite.”

What Mrs. Fike thought has not been handed down.

She led Una past a series of closets, each furnished with two straight chairs on either side of a table, a carbon print of a chilly-looking cathedral, and a slice of carpet on which one was rather disappointed not to find the label, “Bath Mat.”

“These are the reception-rooms where the girls are allowed to receive callers. Any time—up to a quarter to ten,” Mrs. Fike said.

Una decided that they were better fitted for a hair-dressing establishment.

The living-room was her first revelation of the Temperance Home as something besides a prison—as an abiding-place for living, eager, sensitive girls. It was not luxurious, but it had been arranged by some one who made allowance for a weakness for pretty things, even on the part of young females observing the rules in a Christian home. There was a broad fireplace, built-in book-shelves, a long table; and, in wicker chairs with chintz cushions, were half a dozen curious girls. Una was sure that one of them, a fizzy-haired, laughing girl, secretly nodded to her, and she was comforted.

Up the stairs to a marvelous bathroom with tempting shower-baths, a small gymnasium, and, on the roof, a garden and loggia and basket-ball court. It was cool and fresh up here, on even the hottest summer evenings, and here the girls were permitted to lounge in negligées till after ten, Mrs. Fike remarked, with a half-smile.

Una smiled back.

As they went through the bedroom floors, with Mrs. Fike stalking ahead, a graceful girl in lace cap and negligée came bouncing out of a door between them, drew herself up and saluted Mrs. Fike’s back, winked at Una amicably, and for five steps imitated Mrs. Fike’s aggressive stride.

“Yes, I would be glad to come here!” Una said, cheerfully, to Mrs. Fike, who looked at her suspiciously, but granted: “Well, we’ll look up your references. Meantime, if you like—or don’t like, I suppose—you might talk to a Mrs. Esther Lawrence, who wants a room-mate.”

“Oh, I don’t think I’d like a room-mate.”

“My dear young lady, this place is simply full of young persons who would like and they wouldn’t like—and forsooth we must change every plan to suit their high and mighty convenience! I’m not at all sure that we shall have a single room vacant for at least six months, and of course—”

“Well, could I talk to Mrs.—Lawrence, was it?”

“Most assuredly. I expect you to talk to her! Come with me.”

Una followed abjectly, and the matron seemed well pleased with her reformation of this wayward young woman. Her voice was curiously anemic, however, as she rapped on a bedroom door and called, “Oh, Mrs. Lawrence!”

A husky, capable voice within, “Yeah, what is’t?”

“It’s Mrs. Fike, deary. I think I have a room-mate for you.”

“Well, you wait’ll I get something on, will you!”

Mrs. Fike waited. She waited two minutes. She looked at a wrist-watch in a leather band while she tapped her sensibly clad foot. She tried again: “We’re waiting, deary!”

There was no answer from within, and it was two minutes more before the door was opened.

Una was conscious of a room pleasant with white-enameled woodwork; a denim-covered couch and a narrow, prim brass bed, a litter of lingerie and sheets of newspaper; and, as the dominating center of it all, a woman of thirty, tall, high-breasted, full-faced, with a nose that was large but pleasant, black eyes that were cool and direct and domineering—Mrs. Esther Lawrence.

“You kept us waiting so long,” complained Mrs. Fike.

Mrs. Lawrence stared at her as though she were an impudent servant. She revolved on Una, and with a self-confident kindliness in her voice, inquired, “What’s your name, child?”

“Una Golden.”

“We’ll talk this over.... Thank you, Mrs. Fike.”

“Well, now,” Mrs. Fike endeavored, “be sure you both are satisfied—”

“Don’t you worry! We will, all right!”

Mrs. Fike glared at her and retired.

Mrs. Lawrence grinned, stretched herself on the couch, mysteriously produced a cigarette, and asked, “Smoke?”

“No, thanks.”

“Sit down, child, and be comfy. Oh, would you mind opening that window? Not supposed to smoke.... Poor Ma Fike—I just can’t help deviling her. Please don’t think I’m usually as nasty as I am with her. She has to be kept in her place or she’ll worry you to death.... Thanks.... Do sit down—woggle up the pillow on the bed and be comfy.... You look like a nice kid—me, I’m a lazy, slatternly, good-natured old hex, with all the bad habits there are and a profound belief that the world is a hell of a place, but I’m fine to get along with, and so let’s take a shot at rooming together. If we scrap, we can quit instanter, and no bad feelings.... I’d really like to have you come in, because you look as though you were on, even if you are rather meek and kitteny; and I’m scared to death they’ll wish some tough little Mick on to me, or some pious sister who hasn’t been married and believes in pussy-footing around and taking it all to God in prayer every time I tell her the truth.... What do you think, kiddy?”

Una was by this cock-sure disillusioned, large person more delighted than by all the wisdom of Mr. Wilkins or the soothing of Mrs. Sessions. She felt that, except for Walter, it was the first time since she had come to New York that she had found an entertaining person.

“Yes,” she said, “do let’s try it.”

“Good! Now let me warn you first off, that I may be diverting at times, but I’m no good. To-morrow I’ll pretend to be a misused and unfortunate victim, but your young and almost trusting eyes make me feel candid for about fifteen minutes. I certainly got a raw deal from my beloved husband—that’s all you’ll hear from me about him. By the way, I’m typical of about ten thousand married women in business about whose noble spouses nothing is ever said. But I suppose I ought to have bucked up and made good in business (I’m a bum stenog. for Pitcairn, McClure & Stockley, the bond house). But I can’t. I’m too lazy, and it doesn’t seem worth while.... And, oh, we are exploited, women who are on jobs. The bosses give us a lot of taffy and raise their hats—but they don’t raise our wages, and they think that if they keep us till two G.M. taking dictation they make it all right by apologizing. Women are a lot more conscientious on jobs than men are—but that’s because we’re fools; you don’t catch the men staying till six-thirty because the boss has shystered all afternoon and wants to catch up on his correspondence. But we—of course we don’t dare to make dates for dinner, lest we have to stay late. We don’t dare!”

“I bet you do!”

“Yes—well, I’m not so much of a fool as some of the rest—or else more of a one. There’s Mamie Magen—she’s living here; she’s with Pitcairn, too. You’ll meet her and be crazy about her. She’s a lame Jewess, and awfully plain, except she’s got lovely eyes, but she’s got a mind like a tack. Well, she’s the little angel-pie about staying late, and some day she’ll probably make four thousand bucks a year. She’ll be mayor of New York, or executive secretary of the Young Women’s Atheist Association or something. But still, she doesn’t stay late and plug hard because she’s scared, but because she’s got ambition. But most of the women—Lord! they’re just cowed sheep.”

“Yes,” said Una.

A million discussions of Women in Business going on—a thousand of them at just that moment, perhaps—men employers declaring that they couldn’t depend on women in their offices, women asserting that women were the more conscientious. Una listened and was content; she had found some one with whom to play, with whom to talk and hate the powers.... She felt an impulse to tell Mrs. Lawrence all about Troy Wilkins and her mother and—and perhaps even about Walter Babson. But she merely treasured up the thought that she could do that some day, and politely asked:

“What about Mrs. Fike? Is she as bad as she seems?”

“Why, that’s the best little skeleton of contention around here. There’s three factions. Some girls say she’s just plain devil—mean as a floor-walker. That’s what I think—she’s a rotter and a four-flusher. You notice the way she crawls when I stand up to her. Why, they won’t have Catholics here, and I’m one of those wicked people, and she knows it! When she asked my religion I told her I was a ‘Romanist Episcopalian,’ and she sniffed and put me down as an Episcopalian—I saw her!... Then some of the girls think she’s really good-hearted—just gruff—bark worse than her bite. But you ought to see how she barks at some of the younger girls—scares’em stiff—and keeps picking on them about regulations—makes their lives miserable. Then there’s a third section that thinks she’s merely institutionalized—training makes her as hard as any other kind of a machine. You’ll find lots like her in this town—in all the charities.”

“But the girls—they do have a good time here?”

“Yes, they do. It’s sort of fun to fight Ma Fike and all the fool rules. I enjoy smoking here twice as much as I would anywhere else. And Fike isn’t half as bad as the board of visitors—bunch of fat, rich, old Upper-West-Siders with passementeried bosoms, doing tea-table charity, and asking us impertinent questions, and telling a bunch of hard-worked slaves to be virtuous and wash behind their ears—the soft, ignorant, conceited, impractical parasites! But still, it’s all sort of like a cranky boarding-school for girls—and you know what fun the girls have there, with midnight fudge parties and a teacher pussy-footing down the hall trying to catch them.”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been to one.”

“Well—doesn’t matter.... Another thing—some day, when you come to know more men— Know many?”

“Very few.”

“Well, you’ll find this town is full of bright young men seeking an economical solution of the sex problem—to speak politely—and you’ll find it a relief not to have them on your door-step.’S safe here.... Come in with me, kid. Give me an audience to talk to.”

“Yes,” said Una.

§ 2

It was hard to leave the kindly Herbert Grays of the flat, but Una made the break and arranged all her silver toilet-articles—which consisted of a plated-silver hair-brush, a German-silver nail-file, and a good, plain, honest rubber comb—on the bureau in Mrs. Lawrence’s room.

With the shyness of a girl on her first night in boarding-school, Una stuck to Mrs. Lawrence’s side in the noisy flow of strange girls down to the dining-room. She was used to being self-absorbed in the noisiest restaurants, but she was trembly about the knees as she crossed the room among curious upward glances; she found it very hard to use a fork without clattering it on the plate when she sat with Mrs. Lawrence and four strangers, at a table for six.

They all were splendidly casual and wise and good-looking. With no men about to intimidate them—or to attract them—they made a solid phalanx of bland, satisfied femininity, and Una felt more barred out than in an office. She longed for a man who would be curious about her, or cross with her, or perform some other easy, customary, simple-hearted masculine trick.

But she was taken into the friendship of the table when Mrs. Lawrence had finished a harangue on the cardinal sin of serving bean soup four times in two weeks.

“Oh, shut up, Lawrence, and introduce the new kid!” said one girl.

“You wait till I get through with my introductory remarks, Cassavant. I’m inspired to-night. I’m going to take a plate of bean soup and fit it over Ma Fike’s head—upside down.”

“Oh, give Ma Fike a rest!”

Una was uneasy. She wasn’t sure whether this repartee was friendly good spirits or a nagging feud. Like all the ungrateful human race, she considered whether she ought to have identified herself with the noisy Esther Lawrence on entering the Home. So might a freshman wonder, or the guest of a club; always the amiable and vulgar Lawrences are most doubted when they are best-intentioned.

Una was relieved when she was welcomed by the four:

Mamie Magen, the lame Jewess, in whose big brown eyes was an eternal prayer for all of harassed humanity.

Jennie Cassavant, in whose eyes was chiefly a prayer that life would keep on being interesting—she, the dark, slender, loquacious, observant child who had requested Mrs. Lawrence to shut up.

Rose Larsen, like a pretty, curly-haired boy, though her shoulders were little and adorable in a white-silk waist.

Mrs. Amesbury, a nun of business, pale and silent; her thin throat shrouded in white net; her voice low and self-conscious; her very blood seeming white—a woman with an almost morbid air of guarded purity, whom you could never associate with the frank crudities of marriage. Her movements were nervous and small; she never smiled; you couldn’t be boisterous with her. Yet, Mrs. Lawrence whispered she was one of the chief operators of the telephone company, and, next to the thoughtful and suffering Mamie Magen, the most capable woman she knew.

“How do you like the Tempest and Protest, Miss Golden?” the lively Cassavant said, airily.

“I don’t—”

“Why! The Temperance and Protection Home.”

“Well, I like Mrs. Fike’s shoes. I should think they’d be fine to throw at cats.”

“Good work, Golden. You’re admitted!”

“Say, Magen,” said Mrs. Lawrence, “Golden agrees with me about offices—no chance for women—”

Mamie Magen sighed, and “Esther,” she said, in a voice which must naturally have been rasping, but which she had apparently learned to control like a violin—“Esther dear, if you could ever understand what offices have done for me! On the East Side—always it was work and work and watch all the pretty girls in our block get T. B. in garment-factories, or marry fellows that weren’t any good and have a baby every year, and get so thin and worn out; and the garment-workers’ strikes and picketing on cold nights. And now I am in an office—all the fellows are dandy and polite—not like the floor superintendent where I worked in a department store; he would call down a cash-girl for making change slow—! I have a chance to do anything a man can do. The boss is just crazy to find women that will take an interest in the work, like it was their own you know, he told you so himself—”

“Sure, I know the line of guff,” said Mrs. Lawrence. “And you take an interest, and get eighteen plunks per for doing statistics that they couldn’t get a real college male in trousers to do for less than thirty-five.”

“Or put it like this, Lawrence,” said Jennie Cassavant. “Magen admits that the world in general is a muddle, and she thinks offices are heaven because by comparison with sweat-shops they are half-way decent.”

The universal discussion was on. Everybody but Una and the nun of business threw everything from facts to bread pills about the table, and they enjoyed themselves in as unfeminized and brutal a manner as men in a café. Una had found some one with whom to talk her own shop—and shop is the only reasonable topic of conversation in the world; witness authors being intellectual about editors and romanticism; lovers absorbed in the technique of holding hands; or mothers interested in babies, recipes, and household ailments.

After dinner they sprawled all over the room of Una and Mrs. Lawrence, and talked about theaters, young men, and Mrs. Fike for four solid hours—all but the pretty, boyish Rose Larsen, who had a young man coming to call at eight. Even the new-comer, Una, was privileged to take part in giving Rose extensive, highly detailed, and not entirely proper advice—advice of a completeness which would doubtless have astonished the suitor, then dressing somewhere in a furnished room and unconscious of the publicity of his call. Una also lent Miss Larsen a pair of silk stockings, helped three other girls to coerce her curly hair, and formed part of the solemn procession that escorted her to the top of the stairs when the still unconscious young man was announced from below. And it was Una who was able to see the young man without herself being seen, and to win notoriety by being able to report that he had smooth black hair, a small mustache, and carried a stick.

Una was living her boarding-school days now, at twenty-six. The presence of so many possible friends gave her self-confidence and self-expression. She went to bed happy that night, home among her own people, among the women who, noisy or reticent, slack or aspiring, were joined to make possible a life of work in a world still heavy-scented with the ideals of the harem.

CHAPTER XII

THAT same oasis of a week gave to Una her first taste of business responsibility, of being in charge and generally comporting herself as do males. But in order to rouse her thus, Chance broke the inoffensive limb of unfortunate Mr. Troy Wilkins as he was stepping from his small bronchial motor-car to an icy cement block, on seven o’clock of Friday evening.

When Una arrived at the office on Saturday morning she received a telephone message from Mr. Wilkins, directing her to take charge of the office, of Bessie Kraker, and the office-boy, and the negotiations with the Comfy Coast Building and Development Company regarding the planning of three rows of semi-detached villas.

For three weeks the office was as different from the treadmill that it familiarly had been, as the Home Club and Lawrence’s controversial room were different from the Grays’ flat. She was glad to work late, to arrive not at eight-thirty, but at a quarter to eight, to gallop down to a cafeteria for coffee and a sandwich at noon, to be patient with callers, and to try to develop some knowledge of spelling in that child of nature, Bessie Kraker. She walked about the office quickly, glancing proudly at its neatness. Daily, with an operator’s headgear, borrowed from the telephone company, over her head, she spent half an hour talking with Mr. Wilkins, taking his dictation, receiving his cautions and suggestions, reassuring him that in his absence the Subway ran and Tammany still ruled. After an agitated conference with the vice-president of the Comfy Coast Company, during which she was eloquent as an automobile advertisement regarding Mr. Wilkins’s former masterpieces with their “every modern improvement, parquet floors, beam ceilings, plate-rack, hardwood trim throughout, natty and novel decorations,” Una reached the zenith of salesman’s virtues—she “closed the deal.”

Mr. Wilkins came back and hemmed and hawed a good deal; he praised the work she hadn’t considered well done, and pointed out faults in what she considered particularly clever achievements, and was laudatory but dissatisfying in general. In a few days he, in turn, reached the zenith of virtue on the part of boss—he raised her salary. To fifteen dollars a week. She was again merely his secretary, however, and the office trudged through another normal period when all past drama seemed incredible and all the future drab.

But Una was certain now that she could manage business, could wheedle Bessies and face pompous vice-presidents and satisfy querulous Mr. Wilkinses. She looked forward; she picked at architecture as portrayed in Mr. Wilkins’s big books; she learned the reason and manner of the rows of semi-detached, semi-suburban, semi-comfortable, semi-cheap, and somewhat less than semi-attractive houses.

She was not afraid of the office world now; she had a part in the city and a home.

§ 2

She thought of Walter Babson. Sometimes, when Mrs. Lawrence was petulant or the office had been unusually exhausting, she fancied that she missed him. But instead of sitting and brooding over folded hands, in woman’s ancient fashion, she took a man’s unfair advantage—she went up to the gymnasium of the Home Club and worked with the chest-weights and flying-rings—a solemn, happy, busy little figure. She laughed more deeply, and she felt the enormous rhythm of the city, not as a menacing roar, but as a hymn of triumph.