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.

Sec. 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.

Sec. 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.

Sec. 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.

Sec. 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.

Sec. 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.

Sec. 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.

Sec. 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 naive 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!"

Sec. 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.

Sec. 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.

Sec. 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 cafe 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 debacle. 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."

Sec. 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.

Sec. 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.

Sec. 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.

Sec. 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 negligees 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 negligee 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."