There was no caste, though there was much factional rivalry, among the slaves beneath—the stenographers, copyists, clerks, waiting-room attendants, office-boys, elevator-boys. They were expected to keep clean and be quick-moving; beyond that they were as unimportant to the larger phases of office politics as frogs to a summer hotel. Only the cashier's card index could remember their names.... Though they were not deprived of the chief human satisfaction and vice—feeling superior. The most snuffle-nosed little mailing-girl on the office floor felt superior to all of the factory workers, even the foremen, quite as negro house-servants look down on poor white trash.

Jealousy of position, cattishness, envy of social standing—these were as evident among the office-women as they are in a woman's club; and Una had to admit that woman's cruelty to woman often justified the prejudices of executives against the employment of women in business; that women were the worst foes of Woman.

To Una's sympathies, the office proletarians were her own poor relations. She sighed over the cheap jackets, with silesia linings and raveled buttonholes, which nameless copyists tried to make attractive by the clean embroidered linen collars which they themselves laundered in wash-bowls in the evening. She discovered that even after years of experience with actual office-boys and elevator-boys, Mr. Ross still saw them only as slangy, comic-paper devils. Then, in the elevator, she ascertained that the runners made about two hundred trips up and down the dark chutes every day, and wondered if they always found it comic to do so. She saw the office-boys, just growing into the age of interest in sex and acquiring husky male voices and shambling sense of shame, yearn at the shrines of pasty-faced stenographers. She saw the humanity of all this mass—none the less that they envied her position and spoke privily of "those snippy private secretaries that think they're so much sweller than the rest of us."

She watched with peculiar interest one stratum: the old ladies, the white-haired, fair-handed women of fifty and sixty and even seventy, spinsters and widows, for whom life was nothing but a desk and a job of petty pickings—mailing circulars or assorting letters or checking up lists. She watched them so closely because she speculated always, "Will I ever be like that?"

They seemed comfortable; gossipy they were, and fond of mothering the girls. But now and then one of them would start to weep, cry for an hour together, with her white head on a spotty desk-blotter, till she forgot her homelessness and uselessness. Epidemics of hysteria would spring up sometimes, and women of thirty-five or forty—normally well content—would join the old ladies in sobbing. Una would wonder if she would be crying like that at thirty-five—and at sixty-five, with thirty barren, weeping years between. Always she saw the girls of twenty-two getting tired, the women of twenty-eight getting dry and stringy, the women of thirty-five in a solid maturity of large-bosomed and widowed spinsterhood, the old women purring and catty and tragic.... She herself was twenty-eight now, and she knew that she was growing sallow, that the back of her neck ached more often, and that she had no release in sight save the affably dull Mr. Julius Edward Schwirtz.

Machines were the Pemberton force, and their greatest rivals were the machines of steel and wood, at least one of which each new efficiency expert left behind him: Machines for opening letters and sealing them, automatic typewriters, dictation phonographs, pneumatic chutes. But none of the other machines was so tyrannical as the time-clock. Una admitted to herself that she didn't see how it was possible to get so many employees together promptly without it, and she was duly edified by the fact that the big chiefs punched it, too.... But she noticed that after punching it promptly at nine, in an unctuous manner which said to all beholders, "You see that even I subject myself to this delightful humility," Mr. S. Herbert Ross frequently sneaked out and had breakfast....

She knew that the machines were supposed to save work. But she was aware that the girls worked just as hard and long and hopelessly after their introduction as before; and she suspected that there was something wrong with a social system in which time-saving devices didn't save time for anybody but the owners. She was not big enough nor small enough to have a patent cure-all solution ready. She could not imagine any future for these women in business except the accidents of marriage or death—or a revolution in the attitude toward them. She saw that the comfortable average men of the office sooner or later, if they were but faithful and lived long enough, had opportunities, responsibility, forced upon them. No such force was used upon the comfortable average women!

She endeavored to picture a future in which women, the ordinary, philoprogenitive, unambitious women, would have some way out besides being married off or killed off. She envisioned a complete change in the fundamental purpose of organized business from the increased production of soap—or books or munitions—to the increased production of happiness. How this revolution was to be accomplished she had but little more notion than the other average women in business. She blindly adopted from Mamie Magen a half-comprehended faith in a Fabian socialism, a socializing that would crawl slowly through practical education and the preaching of kinship, through profit-sharing and old-age pensions, through scientific mosquito-slaying and cancer-curing and food reform and the abolition of anarchistic business competition, to a goal of tolerable and beautiful life. Of one thing she was sure: This age, which should adjudge happiness to be as valuable as soap or munitions, would never come so long as the workers accepted the testimony of paid spokesmen like S. Herbert Ross to the effect that they were contented and happy, rather than the evidence of their own wincing nerves to the effect that they lived in a polite version of hell.... She was more and more certain that the workers weren't discontented enough; that they were too patient with lives insecure and tedious. But she refused to believe that the age of comparative happiness would always be a dream; for already, at Herzfeld & Cohn's she had tasted of an environment where no one considered himself a divinely ruling chief, and where it was not a crime to laugh easily. But certainly she did not expect to see this age during her own life. She and her fellows were doomed, unless they met by chance with marriage or death; or unless they crawled to the top of the heap. And this last she was determined to do. Though she did hope to get to the top without unduly kicking the shrieking mass of slaves beneath her, as the bright young men learned to do.

Whenever she faced Mr. Ross's imperturbable belief that things-as-they-are were going pretty well, that "you can't change human nature," Una would become meek and puzzled, lose her small store of revolutionary economics, and wonder, grope, doubt her millennial faith. Then she would again see the dead eyes of young girls as they entered the elevators at five-thirty, and she would rage at all chiefs and bright young men.... A gold-eye-glassed, kitten-stepping, good little thing she was, and competent to assist Mr. Ross in his mighty labors, yet at heart she was a shawled Irish peasant, or a muzhik lost in the vastness of the steppes; a creature elemental and despairing, facing mysterious powers of nature—human nature.



CHAPTER XV

Mr. Julius Edward Schwirtz was a regular visitant at the flat of Mrs. Lawrence and Una. Mrs. Lawrence liked him; in his presence she abandoned her pretense of being interested in Mamie Magen's arid intellectualism, and Una's quivering anxieties. Mr. Schwirtz was ready for any party, whenever he was "in off the road."

Una began to depend on him for amusements. Mrs. Lawrence encouraged her to appear at her best before him. When he or one of Mrs. Lawrence's men was coming the two women had an early and quick dinner of cold ham and canned soup, and hastily got out the electric iron to press a frock; produced Pemberton's Flesh-Tinted Vanisho Powder, and the lip-stick whose use Una hated, but which she needed more and more as she came back from the office bloodless and cold. They studied together the feminine art of using a new veil, a flower, or fresh white-kid gloves, to change one's appearance.

Poor Una! She was thinking now, secretly and shamefacedly, of the "beautifying methods" which she saw advertised in every newspaper and cheap magazine. She rubbed her red, desk-calloused elbows with Pemberton's cold-cream. She cold-creamed and massaged her face every night, standing wearily before a milky mirror in the rather close and lingerie-scattered bedroom, solemnly rotating her fingers about her cheeks and forehead, stopping to conjecture that the pores in her nose were getting enlarged. She rubbed her hair with Pemberton's "Olivine and Petrol" to keep it from growing thin, and her neck with cocoanut oil to make it more full. She sent for a bottle of "Mme. LeGrand's Bust-Developer," and spent several Saturday afternoons at the beauty parlors of Mme. Isoldi, where in a little booth shut off by a white-rubber curtain, she received electrical massages, applications of a magic N-ray hair-brush, vigorous cold-creaming and warm-compressing, and enormous amounts of advice about caring for the hair follicles, from a young woman who spoke French with a Jewish accent.

By a twist of psychology, though she had not been particularly fond of Mr. Schwirtz, but had anointed herself for his coming because he was a representative of men, yet after months of thus dignifying his attentions, the very effort made her suppose that she must be fond of him. Not Mr. Schwirtz, but her own self did she befool with Pemberton's "Preparations de Paris."

Sometimes with him alone, sometimes with him and Mrs. Lawrence and one of Mrs. Lawrence's young businessman attendants, Una went to theaters and dinners and heterogeneous dances.

She was dazzled and excited when Mr. Schwirtz took her to the opening of the Champs du Pom-Pom, the latest potpourri of amusements on Broadway. All under one roof were a super-vaudeville show, a smart musical comedy, and the fireworks of one-act plays; a Chinese restaurant, and a Louis Quinze restaurant and a Syrian desert-caravan restaurant; a ballroom and an ice-skating rink; a summer garden that, in midwinter, luxuriated in real trees and real grass, and a real brook crossed by Japanese bridges. Mr. Schwirtz was tireless and extravagant and hearty at the Champs du Pom-Pom. He made Una dance and skate; he had a box for the vaudeville; he gave her caviar canape and lobster a la Rue des Trois Soeurs in the Louis Quinze room; and sparkling Burgundy in the summer garden, where mocking-birds sang in the wavering branches above their table. Una took away an impressionistic picture of the evening—

Scarlet and shadowy green, sequins of gold, slim shoulders veiled in costly mist. The glitter of spangles, the hissing of silk, low laughter, and continual music quieter than a dream. Crowds that were not harsh busy folk of the streets, but a nodding procession of gallant men and women. A kindly cleverness which inspirited her, and a dusky perfume in which she could meditate forever, like an Egyptian goddess throned at the end of incense-curtained aisles. Great tapestries of velvet and jeweled lights; swift, smiling servants; and the languorous well-being of eating strange, delicious foods. Orchids and the scent of poppies and spell of the lotos-flower, the bead of wine and lips that yearned; ecstasy in the Oriental pride of a superb Jewess who was singing to the demure enchantment of little violins. Her restlessness satisfied, a momentary pang of distrust healed by the brotherly talk of the broad-shouldered man who cared for her and nimbly fulfilled her every whim. An unvoiced desire to keep him from drinking so many highballs; an enduring thankfulness to him when she was back at the flat; a defiant joy that he had kissed her good-night—just once, and so tenderly; a determination to "be good for him," and a fear that he had "spent too much money on her to-night," and a plan to reason with him about whisky and extravagance. A sudden hatred of the office to which she would have to return in the morning, and a stronger, more sardonic hatred of hearing Mr. S. Herbert Ross pluck out his vest-pocket harp and hymn his own praise in a one-man choir, cherubic, but slightly fat. A descent from high gardens of moonlight to the reality of the flat, where Lawrence was breathing loudly in her sleep; the oily smell of hairs tangled in her old hair-brush; the sight of the alarm-clock which in just six hours would be flogging her off to the mill. A sudden, frightened query as to what scornful disdain Walter Babson would fling at her if he saw her glorying in this Broadway circus with the heavy Mr. Schwirtz. A ghostly night-born feeling that she still belonged to Walter, living or dead, and a wonder as to where in all the world he might be. A defiant protest that she idealized Walter, that he wasn't so awfully superior to the Champs du Pom-Pom as this astral body of his was pretending, and a still more defiant gratitude to Mr. Schwirtz as she crawled into the tousled bed and Mrs. Lawrence half woke to yawn, "Oh, that—you—Gold'n? Gawd! I'm sleepy. Wha' time is 't?"

Sec. 2

Una was sorry. She hated herself as what she called a "quitter," but now, in January, 1910, she was at an impasse. She could just stagger through each day of S. Herbert Ross and office diplomacies. She had been at Pemberton's for a year and a third, and longer than that with Mrs. Lawrence at the flat. The summer vacation of 1909 she had spent with Mrs. Lawrence at a Jersey coast resort. They had been jealous, had quarreled, and made it up every day, like lovers. They had picked up two summer men, and Mrs. Lawrence had so often gone off on picnics with her man that Una had become uneasy, felt soiled, and come back to the city early. For this Mrs. Lawrence had never forgiven her. She had recently become engaged to a doctor who was going to Akron, Ohio, and she exasperated Una by giving her bland advice about trying to get married. Una never knew whether she was divorced, or whether the mysterious Mr. Lawrence had died.

But even the difficile Lawrence was preferable to the strain at the office. Una was tired clean through and through. She felt as though her very soul had been drained out by a million blood-sucker details—constant adjustments to Ross's demands for admiration of his filthiest office political deals, and the need of keeping friendly with both sides when Ross was engaged in one of his frequent altercations with an assistant.

Often she could not eat in the evening. She would sit on the edge of the bed and cry hopelessly, with a long, feeble, peculiarly feminine sobbing, till Mrs. Lawrence slammed the door and went off to the motion pictures. Una kept repeating a little litany she had made regarding the things she wished people would stop doing—praying to be delivered from Ross's buoyant egotism, from Mrs. Lawrence's wearing of Una's best veils, from Mr. Schwirtz's acting as though he wanted to kiss her whenever he had a whisky breath, from the office-manager who came in to chat with her just when she was busiest, from the office-boy who always snapped his fingers as he went down the corridor outside her door, and from the elevator-boy who sucked his teeth.

She was sorry. She wanted to climb. She didn't want to be a quitter. But she was at an impasse.

On a January day the Pemberton office beheld that most terrifying crisis that can come to a hard, slave-driving office. As the office put it, "The Old Man was on a rampage."

Mr. Pemberton, senior, most hoarily awful of all the big chiefs, had indigestion or a poor balance-sheet. He decided that everything was going wrong. He raged from room to room. He denounced the new poster, the new top for the talcum-powder container, the arrangement of the files, and the whispering in the amen corner of veteran stenographers. He sent out flocks of "office memoes." Everybody trembled. Mr. Pemberton's sons actually did some work; and, as the fire spread and the minor bosses in turn raged among their subordinates, the girls who packed soap down in the works expected to be "fired." After a visitation from Mr. Pemberton and three raging memoes within fifteen minutes, Mr. S. Herbert Ross retreated toward the Lafayette Cafe, and Una was left to face Mr. Pemberton's bear-like growls on his next appearance.

When he did appear he seemed to hold her responsible for all the world's long sadness. Meanwhile the printer was telephoning for Mr. Ross's O. K. on copy, the engravers wanted to know where the devil was that color-proof, the advertising agency sarcastically indicated that it was difficult for them to insert an advertisement before they received the order, and a girl from the cashier's office came nagging in about a bill for India ink.

The memoes began to get the range of her desk again, and Mr. Pemberton's voice could be heard in a distant part of the office, approaching, menacing, all-pervading.

Una fled. She ran to a wash-room, locked the door, leaned panting against it, as though detectives were pursuing her. She was safe for a moment. They might miss her, but she was insulated from demands of, "Where's Ross, Miss Golden? Well, why don't you know where he is?" from telephone calls, and from memoes whose polite "please" was a gloved threat.

But even to this refuge the familiar sound of the office penetrated—the whirr which usually sounded as a homogeneous murmur, but which, in her acute sensitiveness, she now analyzed into the voices of different typewriters—one flat, rapid, staccato; one a steady, dull rattle. The "zzzzz" of typewriter-carriages being shoved back. The roll of closing elevator doors, and the rumble of the ascending elevator. The long burr of an unanswered telephone at a desk, again and again; and at last an angry "Well! Hello? Yes, yes; this 's Mr. Jones. What-duh-yuh want?" Voices mingled; a shout for Mr. Brown; the hall-attendant yelping: "Miss Golden! Where's Miss Golden? Anything for Sanford? Mr. Smith, d'you know if there's anything for Sanford?" Always, over and through all, the enveloping clatter of typewriters, and the city roar behind that, breaking through the barrier of the door.

The individual, analyzed sounds again blended in one insistent noise of hurry which assailed Una's conscience, summoned her back to her work.

She sighed, washed her stinging eyes, opened the door, and trailed back toward her den.

In the corridor she passed three young stenographers and heard one of them cry: "Yes, but I don't care if old Alfalfa goes on a rampage twenty-five hours a day. I'm through. Listen, May, say, what d'you know about me? I'm engaged! No, honest, straight I am! Look at me ring! Aw, it is not; it's a regular engagement-ring. I'm going to be out of this hell-hole in two weeks, and Papa Pemberton can work off his temper on somebody else. Me, I'm going to do a slumber marathon till noon every day."

"Gee!"

"Engaged!"

—said the other girls, and—

"Engaged! Going to sleep till noon every day. And not see Mr. Ross or Mr. Pemberton! That's my idea of heaven!" thought Una.

There was a pile of inquiring memoes from Mr. Pemberton and the several department heads on her desk. As she looked at them Una reached the point of active protest.

"S. Herbert runs for shelter when the storm breaks, and leaves me here to stand it. Why isn't he supposed to be here on the job just as much as I am?" she declaimed. "Why haven't I the nerve to jump up and go out for a cup of tea the way he would? By jiminy! I will!"

She was afraid of the indefinite menace concealed in all the Pemberton system as she signaled an elevator. But she did not answer a word when the hall-attendant said, "You are going out, Miss Golden?"

She went to a German-Jewish bakery and lunch-room, and reflectively got down thin coffee served in a thick cup, a sugar-warted Kaffeekuche, and two crullers. She was less willing to go back to work than she had been in her refuge in the wash-room. She felt that she would rather be dead than return and subject herself to the strain. She was "through," like the little engaged girl. She was a "quitter."

For half an hour she remained in the office, but she left promptly at five-thirty, though her desk was choked with work and though Mr. Ross telephoned that he would be back before six, which was his chivalrous way of demanding that she stay till seven.

Mr. Schwirtz was coming to see her that evening. He had suggested vaudeville.

She dressed very carefully. She did her hair in a new way.

When Mr. Schwirtz came she cried that she couldn't go to a show. She was "clean played out." She didn't know what she could do. Pemberton's was too big a threshing-machine for her. She was tired—"absolutely all in."

"Poor little sister!" he said, and smoothed her hair.

She rested her face on his shoulder. It seemed broad and strong and protective.

She was glad when he put his arm about her.

She was married to Mr. Schwirtz about two weeks later.

Sec. 3

She had got herself to call him "Ed." ... "Eddie" she could not encompass, even in that fortnight of rushing change and bewilderment.

She asked for a honeymoon trip to Savannah. She wanted to rest; she had to rest or she would break, she said.

They went to Savannah, to the live-oaks and palmettoes and quiet old squares.

But she did not rest. Always she brooded about the unleashed brutality of their first night on the steamer, the strong, inescapable man-smell of his neck and shoulders, the boisterous jokes he kept telling her.

He insisted on their staying at a commercial hotel at Savannah. Whenever she went to lie down, which was frequently, he played poker and drank highballs. He tried in his sincerest way to amuse her. He took her to theaters, restaurants, road-houses. He arranged a three days' hunting-trip, with a darky cook. He hired motor-boats and motor-cars and told her every "here's a new one," that he heard. But she dreaded his casual-seeming suggestions that she drink plenty of champagne; dreaded his complaints, whiney as a small boy, "Come now, Unie, show a little fire. I tell you a fellow's got a right to expect it at this time." She dreaded his frankness of undressing, of shaving; dreaded his occasional irritated protests of "Don't be a finicking, romantic school-miss. I may not wear silk underclo' and perfume myself like some bum actor, but I'm a regular guy"; dreaded being alone with him; dreaded always the memory of that first cataclysmic night of their marriage; and mourned, as in secret, for year on year, thousands of women do mourn. "Oh, I wouldn't care now if he had just been gentle, been considerate.... Oh, Ed is good; he does mean to care for me and give me a good time, but—"

When they returned to New York, Mr. Schwirtz said, robustly: "Well, little old trip made consid'able hole in my wad. I'm clean busted. Down to one hundred bucks in the bank."

"Why, I thought you were several thousand ahead!"

"Oh—oh! I lost most of that in a little flyer on stocks—thought I'd make a killing, and got turned into lamb-chops; tried to recoup my losses on that damn flying-machine, passenger-carrying game that that —— —— —— —— let me in for. Never mind, little sister; we'll start saving now. And it was worth it. Some trip, eh? You enjoyed it, didn't you—after the first couple days, while you were seasick? You'll get over all your fool, girly-girly notions now. Women always are like that. I remember the first missus was, too.... And maybe a few other skirts, though I guess I hadn't better tell no tales outa school on little old Eddie Schwirtz, eh? Ha, ha!... Course you high-strung virgin kind of shemales take some time to learn to get over your choosey, finicky ways. But, Lord love you! I don't mind that much. Never could stand for these rough-necks that claim they'd rather have a good, healthy walloping country wench than a nice, refined city lady. Why, I like refinement! Yes, sir, I sure do!... Well, it sure was some trip. Guess we won't forget it in a hurry, eh? Sure is nice to rub up against some Southern swells like we did that night at the Avocado Club. And that live bunch of salesmen. Gosh! Say, I'll never forget that Jock Sanderson. He was a comical cuss, eh? That story of his—"

"No," said Una, "I'll never forget the trip."

But she tried to keep the frenzy out of her voice. The frenzy was dying, as so much of her was dying. She hadn't realized a woman can die so many times and still live. Dead had her heart been at Pemberton's, yet it had secreted enough life to suffer horribly now, when it was again being mauled to death.

And she wanted to spare this man.

She realized that poor Ed Schwirtz, puttering about their temporary room in a side-street family hotel, yawning and scratching his head, and presumably comfortable in suspenders over a woolen undershirt—she realized that he treasured a joyous memory of their Savannah diversions.

She didn't want to take joy away from anybody who actually had it, she reflected, as she went over to the coarse-lace hotel curtains, parted them, stared down on the truck-filled street, and murmured, "No, I can't ever forget."



Part III

MAN AND WOMAN

CHAPTER XVI

For two years Una Golden Schwirtz moved amid the blank procession of phantoms who haunt cheap family hotels, the apparitions of the corridors, to whom there is no home, nor purpose, nor permanence. Mere lodgers for the night, though for score on score of tasteless years they use the same alien hotel room as a place in which to take naps and store their trunks and comb their hair and sit waiting—for nothing. The men are mysterious. They are away for hours or months, or they sit in the smoking-room, glancing up expectant of fortunes that never come. But the men do have friends; they are permitted familiarities by the bartender in the cafe. It is the women and children who are most dehumanized. The children play in the corridors; they become bold and sophisticated; they expect attention from strangers. At fourteen the girls have long dresses and mature admirers, and the boys ape the manners of their shallow elders and discuss brands of cigarettes. The women sit and rock, empty-hearted and barren of hands. When they try to make individual homes out of their fixed molds of rooms—the hard walls, the brass bedsteads, the inevitable bureaus, the small rockers, and the transoms that always let in too much light from the hall at night—then they are only the more pathetic. For the small pictures of pulpy babies photographed as cupids, the tin souvenirs and the pseudo-Turkish scarves draped over trunks rob the rooms of the simplicity which is their only merit.

For two years—two years snatched out of her life and traded for somnambulatory peace, Una lived this spectral life of one room in a family hotel on a side street near Sixth Avenue. The only other dwelling-places she saw were the flats of friends of her husband.

He often said, with a sound of pride: "We don't care a darn for all these would-be social climbers. The wife and I lead a regular Bohemian life. We know a swell little bunch of live ones, and we have some pretty nifty parties, lemme tell you, with plenty poker and hard liquor. And one-two of the bunch have got their own cars—I tell you they make a whole lot more coin than a lot of these society-column guys, even if they don't throw on the agony; and we all pile in and go up to some road-house, and sing, and play the piano, and have a real time."

Conceive Una—if through the fumes of cheap cigarettes you can make out the low lights of her fading hair—sitting there, trying patiently to play a "good, canny fist of poker"—which, as her husband often and irritably assured her, she would never learn to do. He didn't, he said, mind her losing his "good, hard-earned money," but he "hated to see Eddie Schwirtz's own wife more of a boob than Mrs. Jock Sanderson, who's a regular guy; plays poker like a man."

Mrs. Sanderson was a black-haired, big-bosomed woman with a face as hard and smooth and expressionless as a dinner-plate, with cackling laughter and a tendency to say, "Oh, hell, boys!" apropos of nothing. She was a "good sport" and a "good mixer," Mr. Schwirtz averred; and more and more, as the satisfaction of having for his new married mistress a "refined lady" grew dull, he adjured the refined lady to imitate Mrs. Sanderson.

Fortunately, Mr. Schwirtz was out of town two-thirds of the time. But one-third of the time was a good deal, since for weeks before his coming she dreaded him; and for weeks after his going she remembered him with chill shame; since she hadn't even the whole-hearted enthusiasm of hating him, but always told herself that she was a prude, an abnormal, thin-blooded creature, and that she ought to appreciate "Ed's" desire to have her share his good times, be coarse and jolly and natural.

His extravagance was constant. He was always planning to rent an expensive apartment and furnish it, but the money due him after each trip he spent immediately and they were never able to move away from the family hotel. He had to have taxicabs when they went to theaters. He would carol, "Oh, don't let's be pikers, little sister—nothing too good for Eddie Schwirtz, that's my motto." And he would order champagne, the one sort of good wine that he knew. He always overtipped waiters and enjoyed his own generosity. Generous he really was, in a clumsy way. He gave to Una all he had over from his diversions; urged her to buy clothes and go to matinees while he was away, and told it as a good joke that he "blew himself" so extensively on their parties that he often had to take day-coaches instead of sleepers for a week after he left New York.... Una had no notion of how much money he made, but she knew that he never saved it. She would beg: "Why don't you do like so many of the other traveling-men? Your Mr. Sanderson is saving money and buying real estate, even though he does have a good time. Let's cut out some of the unnecessary parties and things—"

"Rats! My Mr. Sanderson is a leet-le tight, like all them Scotch laddies. I'm going to start saving one of these days. But what can you do when the firm screws you down on expense allowances and don't hardly allow you one red cent of bonus on new business? There's no chance for a man to-day—these damn capitalists got everything lashed down. I tell you I'm getting to be a socialist."

He did not seem to be a socialist of the same type as Mamie Magen, but he was interested in socialism to this extent—he always referred to it at length whenever Una mentioned saving money.

She had not supposed that he drank so much. Always he smelled of whisky, and she found quart bottles of it in his luggage when he returned from a trip.

But he never showed signs of drunkenness, except in his urgent attentions to her after one of their "jolly Bohemian parties."

More abhorrent to her was the growing slackness in his personal habits.... He had addressed her with great volubility and earnestness upon his belief that now they were married, she must get rid of all her virginal book-learned notions about reticence between husband and wife. Such feminine "hanky-panky tricks," he assured her, were the cause of "all these finicky, unhappy marriages and these rotten divorces—lot of fool clubwomen and suffragettes and highbrows expecting a man to be like a nun. A man's a man, and the sooner a female gets on to that fact and doesn't nag, nag, nag him, and let's him go round being comfortable and natural, the kinder he'll be to her, and the better it'll be for all parties concerned. Every time! Don't forget that, old lady. Why, there's J. J. Vance at our shop. Married one of these up-dee-dee, poetry-reading, finicky women. Why, he did everything for that woman. Got a swell little house in Yonkers, and a vacuum cleaner, and a hired girl, and everything. Then, my God! she said she was lonely! Didn't have enough housework, that was the trouble with her; and darned if she doesn't kick when J. J. comes in all played out at night because he makes himself comfortable and sits around in his shirt-sleeves and slippers. Tell you, the first thing these women have gotta learn is that a man's a man, and if they learn that they won't need a vote!"

Mr. Schwirtz's notion of being a man was to perform all hygienic processes as publicly as the law permitted. Apparently he was proud of his God-given body—though it had been slightly bloated since God had given it to him—and wanted to inspire her not only with the artistic vision of it, but with his care for it.... His thick woolen undergarments were so uncompromisingly wooleny.

Nor had Mr. Schwirtz any false modesty in his speech. If Una had made out a list of all the things she considered the most banal or nauseatingly vulgar, she would have included most of the honest fellow's favorite subjects. And at least once a day he mentioned his former wife. At a restaurant dinner he gave a full account of her death, embalming, and funeral.

Una identified him with vulgarity so completely that she must often have been unjust to him. At least she was surprised now and then by a reassertion that he was a "highbrow," and that he decidedly disapproved of any sort of vulgarity. Several times this came out when he found her reading novels which were so coarsely realistic as to admit the sex and sweat of the world.

"Even if they are true to life," he said, "I don't see why it's necessary to drag in unpleasant subjects. I tell you a fella gets too much of bad things in this world without reading about 'em in books. Trouble with all these 'realists' as you call 'em, is that they're such dirty-minded hounds themselves that all they can see in life is the bad side."

Una surmised that the writers of such novels might, perhaps, desire to show the bad side in the hope that life might be made more beautiful. But she wasn't quite sure of it, and she suffered herself to be overborne, when he snorted: "Nonsense! These fellas are just trying to show how sensational they can be, t' say nothing of talking like they was so damn superior to the rest of us. Don't read 'em. Read pure authors like Howard Bancock Binch, where, whenever any lady gets seduced or anything like that, the author shows it's because the villain is an atheist or something, and he treats all those things in a nice, fine, decent manner. Good Gawd! sometimes a fella 'd think, to see you scrooge up your nose when I'm shaving, that I'm common as dirt, but lemme tell you, right now, miss, I'm a darn sight too refined to read any of these nasty novels where they go to the trouble of describing homes that ain't any better than pig-pens. Oh, and another thing! I heard you telling Mrs. Sanderson you thought all kids oughta have sex education. My Gawd! I don't know where you get those rotten ideas! Certainly not from me. Lemme tell you, no kid of mine is going to be made nasty-minded by having a lot of stuff like that taught her. Yes, sir, actually taught her right out in school."

Una was sufficiently desirous of avoiding contention to keep to novels which portrayed life—offices and family hotels and perspiratory husbands—as all for the best. But now and then she doubted, and looked up from the pile of her husband's white-footed black-cotton socks to question whether life need be confined to Panama and Pemberton and Schwirtz.

In deference to Mr. Schwirtz's demands on the novelists, one could scarce even suggest the most dreadful scene in Una's life, lest it be supposed that other women really are subject to such horror, or that the statistics regarding immoral diseases really mean anything in households such as we ourselves know.... She had reason to suppose that her husband was damaged goods. She crept to an old family doctor and had a fainting joy to find that she had escaped contamination.

"Though," said the doctor, "I doubt if it would be wise to have a child of his."

"I won't!" she said, grimly.

She knew the ways of not having children. The practical Mr. Schwirtz had seen to that. Strangely enough, he did not object to birth-control, even though it was discussed by just the sort of people who wrote these sensational realistic novels.

There were periods of reaction when she blamed herself for having become so set in antipathy that she always looked for faults; saw as a fault even the love for amusements which had once seemed a virtue in him.

She tried, wistfully and honestly, to be just. She reminded herself constantly that she had enjoyed some of the parties with him—theater and a late supper, with a couple just back from South America.

But—there were so many "buts"! Life was all one obliterating But.

Her worst moments were when she discovered that she had grown careless about appearing before him in that drabbest, most ignoble of feminine attire—a pair of old corsets; that she was falling into his own indelicacies.

Such marionette tragedies mingled ever with the grander passion of seeing life as a ruined thing; her birthright to aspiring cleanness sold for a mess of quick-lunch pottage. And as she walked in a mist of agony, a dumb, blind creature heroically distraught, she could scarce distinguish between sordidness and the great betrayals, so chill and thick was the fog about her.

She thought of suicide, often, but too slow and sullen was her protest for the climax of suicide. And the common sense which she still had urged her that some day, incredibly, there might again be hope. Oftener she thought of a divorce. Of that she had begun to think even on the second day of her married life. She suspected that it would not be hard to get a divorce on statutory grounds. Whenever Mr. Schwirtz came back from a trip he would visibly remove from his suit-case bunches of letters in cheaply pretentious envelopes of pink and lavender. She scorned to try to read them, but she fancied that they would prove interesting to the judges.

Sec. 2

When Mr. Schwirtz was away Una was happy by contrast. Indeed she found a more halcyon rest than at any other period since her girlhood; and in long hours of thinking and reading and trying to believe in life, the insignificant good little thing became a calm-browed woman.

Mrs. Lawrence had married the doctor and gone off to Ohio. They motored much, she wrote, and read aloud, and expected a baby. Una tried to be happy in them.

Una had completely got out of touch with Mr. and Mrs. Sessions, but after her marriage she had gone to call on Mamie Magen, now prosperous and more earnest than ever, in a Greenwich Village flat; on Jennie Cassavant, sometime of the Home Club, now obscurely on the stage; on curly-haired Rose Larsen, who had married a young lawyer. But Una had fancied that they were suspiciously kind to her, and in angry pride she avoided them. She often wondered what they had heard about Mr. Schwirtz from the talkative Mrs. Lawrence. She conceived scenes in which she was haughtily rhapsodic in defending her good, sensible husband before them. Then she would long for them and admit that doubtless she had merely imagined their supercilious pity. But she could not go back to them as a beggar for friendship.

Also, though she never admitted this motive to herself, she was always afraid that some day, if she kept in touch with them, her husband would demand: "Why don't you trot out these fussy lady friends of yours? Ashamed of me, eh?"

So she drifted away from them, and at times when she could not endure solitariness she depended upon the women of the family hotel, whom she met in the corridors and cafe and "parlor."

The aristocrats among them, she found, were the wives of traveling salesmen, good husbands and well loved, most of them, writing to their wives daily and longing for the time when they could have places in the suburbs, with room for chickens and children and love. These aristocrats mingled only with the sound middle-class of the hotel women, whose husbands were clerks and bookkeepers resident in the city, or traveling machinery experts who went about installing small power-plants. They gossiped with Una about the husbands of the declasse women—men suspected to be itinerant quack doctors, sellers of dubious mining or motor stock, or even crooks and gamblers.

There was a group of three or four cheery, buxom, much-bediamonded, much-massaged women, whose occasionally appearing husbands were sleek and overdressed. To Una these women were cordial. They invited her to go shopping, to matinees. But they stopped so often for cocktails, they told so many intimate stories of their relations with their husbands, that Una was timid before them, and edged away from their invitations except when she was desperately lonely. Doubtless she learned more about the mastery of people from them, however, than from the sighing, country-bred hotel women of whom she was more fond; for the cheerful hussies had learned to make the most of their shoddy lives.

Only one woman in the hotel did Una accept as an actual friend—Mrs. Wade, a solid, slangy, contented woman with a child to whom she was devoted. She had, she told Una, "been stuck with a lemon of a husband. He was making five thousand a year when I married him, and then he went to pieces. Good-looking, but regular poor white trash. So I cleaned house—kicked him out. He's in Boston now. Touches me for a ten-spot now and then. I support myself and the kid by working for a department store. I'm a wiz at bossing dressmakers—make a Lucile gown out of the rind of an Edam cheese. Take nothing off nobody—especially you don't see me taking any more husbands off nobody."

Mostly, Una was able to make out an existence by herself.

She read everything—from the lacy sentimentalism of Myrtle Read to Samuel Butler and translations of Gorky and Flaubert. She nibbled at histories of art, and was confirmed in her economic theology by shallow but earnest manuals of popular radicalism. She got books from a branch public library, or picked them up at second-hand stalls. At first she was determined to be "serious" in her reading, but more and more she took light fiction as a drug to numb her nerves—and forgot the tales as soon as she had read them.

In ten years of such hypnotic reading Mrs. Una Golden Schwirtz would not be very different from that Mrs. Captain Golden who, alone in a flat, had read all day, and forgotten what she had read, and let life dream into death.

But now Una was still fighting to keep in life.

She began to work out her first definite philosophy of existence. In essence it was not so very different from the blatant optimism of Mr. S. Herbert Ross—except that it was sincere.

"Life is hard and astonishingly complicated," she concluded. "No one great reform will make it easy. Most of us who work—or want to work—will always have trouble or discontent. So we must learn to be calm, and train all our faculties, and make others happy."

No more original than this was her formulated philosophy—the commonplace creed of a commonplace woman in a rather less than commonplace family hotel. The important thing was not the form of it, but her resolve not to sink into nothingness.... She hoped that some day she would get a job again. She sometimes borrowed a typewriter from the manager of the hotel, and she took down in shorthand the miscellaneous sermons—by Baptists, Catholics, Reformed rabbis, Christian Scientists, theosophists, High Church Episcopalians, Hindu yogis, or any one else handy—with which she filled up her dull Sundays.... Except as practice in stenography she found their conflicting religions of little value to lighten her life. The ministers seemed so much vaguer than the hard-driving business men with whom she had worked; and the question of what Joshua had done seemed to have little relation to what Julius Schwirtz was likely to do. The city had come between her and the Panama belief that somehow, mysteriously, one acquired virtue by enduring dull sermons.

She depended more on her own struggle to make a philosophy.

That philosophy, that determination not to sink into paralyzed despair, often broke down when her husband was in town, but she never gave up trying to make it vital to her.

So, through month on month, she read, rocking slowly in the small, wooden rocker, or lying on the coarse-coverleted bed, while round her the hotel room was still and stale-smelling and fixed, and outside the window passed the procession of life—trucks laden with crates of garments consigned to Kansas City and Bangor and Seattle and Bemidji; taxicabs with passengers for the mammoth hotels; office-girls and policemen and salesmen and all the lusty crew that had conquered the city or were well content to be conquered by it.



CHAPTER XVII

Late in the summer of 1912, at a time when Una did not expect the return of her husband for at least three weeks, she was in their room in the afternoon, reading "Salesmanship for Women," and ruminatively eating lemon-drops from a small bag.

As though he were a betrayed husband dramatically surprising her, Mr. Schwirtz opened the door, dropped a large suit-case, and stood, glaring.

"Well!" he said, with no preliminary, "so here you are! For once you could—"

"Why, Ed! I didn't expect to see you for—"

He closed the door and gesticulated. "No! Of course you didn't. Why ain't you out with some of your swell friends that I ain't good enough to meet, shopping, and buying dresses, and God knows what—"

"Why, Ed!"

"Oh, don't 'why-Ed' me! Well, ain't you going to come and kiss me? Nice reception when a man's come home tired from a hard trip—wife so busy reading a book that she don't even get up from her chair and make him welcome in his own room that he pays for. Yes, by—"

"Why, you didn't—you don't act as though—"

"Yes, sure, that's right; lay it all on—"

"—you wanted me to kiss you."

"Well, neither would anybody if they'd had all the worries I've had, sitting there worrying on a slow, hot train that stopped at every pig-pen—yes, and on a day-coach, too, by golly! Somebody in this family has got to economize!—while you sit here cool and comfortable; not a thing on your mind but your hair; not a thing to worry about except thinking how damn superior you are to your husband! Oh, sure! But I made up my mind—I thought it all out for once, and I made up my mind to one thing, you can help me out by economizing, anyway."

"Oh, Ed, I don't know what you're driving at. I haven't been extravagant, ever. Why, I've asked you any number of times not to spend so much money for suppers and so forth—"

"Yes, sure, lay it all onto me. I'm fair game for everybody that's looking for a nice, soft, easy, safe boob to kick! Why, look there!"

While she still sat marveling he pounced on the meek little five-cent bag of lemon-drops, shook it as though it were a very small kitten, and whined: "Look at this! Candy or something all the while! You never have a single cent left when I come home—candy and ice-cream sodas, and matinees, and dresses, and everything you can think of. If it ain't one thing, it's another. Well, you'll either save from now on—"

"Look here! What do you mean, working off your grouch on—"

"—or else you won't have anything to spend, un'erstand? And when it comes down to talking about grouches I suppose you'll be real pleased to know—this will be sweet news, probably, to you—I've been fired!"

"Fired? Oh, Ed!"

"Yes, fired-oh-Ed. Canned. Got the gate. Thrown out. Got the razzle-dazzle. Got the hook thrown into me. Bounced. Kiyudeled. That is, at least, I will be, as soon as I let the old man get at me, judging from the love-letters he's been sending me, inviting me to cut a switch and come out to the wood-shed with him."

"Oh, Ed dear, what was the trouble?"

She walked up to him, laid her hand on his shoulder. Her voice was earnest, her eyes full of pity. He patted her hand, seemed from her gentle nearness to draw comfort—not passion. He slouched over to the bed, and sat with his thick legs stuck out in front of him, his hands in his trousers pockets, while he mused:

"Oh, I don't hardly know what it is all about. My sales have been falling off, all rightee. But, good Lord! that's no fault of mine. I work my territory jus' as hard as I ever did, but I can't meet the competition of the floor-wax people. They're making an auto polish now—better article at a lower price—and what can I do? They got a full line, varnish, cleaner, polish, swell window displays, national advertising, swell discounts—everything; and I can't buck competition like that. And then a lot of the salesmen at our shop are jealous of me, and one thing and another. Well, now I'll go down and spit the old man in the eye couple o' times, and get canned, unless I can talk him out of his bad acting. Oh, I'll throw a big bluff. I'll be the little misunderstood boy, but I don't honestly think I can put anything across on him. I'm— Oh, hell, I guess I'm getting old. I ain't got the pep I used to have. Not but what J. Eddie Schwirtz can still sell goods, but I can't talk up to the boss like I could once. I gotta feel some sympathy at the home office. And I by God deserve it—way I've worked and slaved for that bunch of cutthroats, and now— Sure, that's the way it goes in this world. I tell you, I'm gonna turn socialist!"

"Ed—listen, Ed. Please, oh, please don't be offended now; but don't you think perhaps the boss thinks you drink too much?"

"How could he? I don't drink very much, and you know it. I don't hardly touch a drop, except maybe just for sociability. God! this temperance wave gets my goat! Lot of hot-air females telling me what I can do and what I can't do—fella that knows when to drink and when to stop. Drink? Why, you ought to see some of the boys! There's Burke McCullough. Say, I bet he puts away forty drinks a day, if he does one, and I don't know that it hurts him any; but me—"

"Yes, I know, dear. I was just thinking—maybe your boss is one of the temperance cranks," Una interrupted. Mr. Schwirtz's arguments regarding the privileges of a manly man sounded very familiar. This did not seem to be a moment for letting her husband get into the full swing of them. She begged: "What will you do if they let you out? I wish there was something I could do to help."

"Dun'no'. There's a pretty close agreement between a lot of the leading paint-and-varnish people—gentleman's agreement—and it's pretty hard to get in any place if you're in Dutch with any of the others. Well, I'm going down now and watch 'em gwillotine me. You better not wait to have dinner with me. I'll be there late, thrashing all over the carpet with the old man, and then I gotta see some fellas and start something. Come here, Una."

He stood up. She came to him, and when he put his two hands on her shoulders she tried to keep her aversion to his touch out of her look.

He shook his big, bald head. He was unhappy and his eyes were old. "Nope," he said; "nope. Can't be done. You mean well, but you haven't got any fire in you. Kid, can't you understand that there are wives who've got so much passion in 'em that if their husbands came home clean-licked, like I am, they'd—oh, their husbands would just naturally completely forget their troubles in love—real love, with fire in it. Women that aren't ashamed of having bodies.... But, oh, Lord! it ain't your fault. I shouldn't have said anything. There's lots of wives like you. More 'n one man's admitted his wife was like that, when he's had a couple drinks under his belt to loosen his tongue. You're not to blame, but— I'm sorry.... Don't mind my grouch when I came in. I was so hot, and I'd been worrying and wanted to blame things onto somebody.... Don't wait for me at dinner. If I ain't here by seven, go ahead and feed. Good-by."

Sec. 2

All she knew was that at six a woman's purring voice on the telephone asked if Mr. Eddie Schwirtz had returned to town yet. That he did not reappear till after midnight. That his return was heralded by wafting breezes with whisky laden. That, in the morning, there was a smear of rice powder on his right shoulder and that he was not so urgent in his attentions to her as ordinarily. So her sympathy for him was lost. But she discovered that she was neither jealous nor indignant—merely indifferent.

He told her at breakfast that, with his usual discernment, he had guessed right. When he had gone to the office he had been discharged.

"Went out with some business acquaintances in the evening—got to pull all the wires I can now," he said.

She said nothing.

Sec. 3

They had less than two hundred dollars ahead. But Mr. Schwirtz borrowed a hundred from his friend, Burke McCullough, and did not visibly have to suffer from want of highballs, cigars, and Turkish baths. From the window of their room Una used to see him cross the street to the cafe entrance of the huge Saffron Hotel—and once she saw him emerge from it with a fluffy blonde. But she did not attack him. She was spellbound in a strange apathy, as in a dream of swimming on forever in a warm and slate-hued sea. She was confident that he would soon have another position. He had over-ridden her own opinions about business—the opinions of the underling who never sees the great work as a rounded whole—till she had come to have a timorous respect for his commercial ability.

Apparently her wifely respect was not generally shared in the paint business. At least Mr. Schwirtz did not soon get his new position.

The manager of the hotel came to the room with his bill and pressed for payment. And after three weeks—after a night when he had stayed out very late and come home reeking with perfume—Mr. Schwirtz began to hang about the room all day long and to soak himself in the luxury of complaining despair.

Then came the black days.

There were several scenes (during which she felt like a beggar about to be arrested) between Mr. Schwirtz and the landlord, before her husband paid part of a bill whose size astounded her.

Mr. Schwirtz said that he was "expecting something to turn up—nothin' he could do but wait for some telephone calls." He sat about with his stockinged feet cocked up on the bed, reading detective stories till he fell asleep in his chair. He drank from unlabeled pint flasks of whisky all day. Once, when she opened a bureau drawer of his by mistake, she saw half a dozen whisky-flasks mixed with grimy collars, and the sour smell nauseated her. But on food—they had to economize on that! He took her to a restaurant of fifteen-cent breakfasts and twenty-five-cent dinners. It was the "parlor floor" of an old brownstone house—two rooms, with eggy table-cloths, and moldings of dusty stucco.

She avoided his presence as much as possible. Mrs. Wade, the practical dressmaker, who was her refuge among the women of the hotel, seemed to understand what was going on, and gave Una a key to her room. Here Una sat for hours. When she went back to their room quarrels would spring up apropos of anything or nothing.

The fault was hers as much as his. She was no longer trying to conceal her distaste, while he, who had a marital conscience of a sort, was almost pathetic in his apologies for being unable to "show her a good time." And he wanted her soothing. He was more and more afraid of her as the despair of the jobless man in the hard city settled down on him. He wanted her to agree with him that there was a conspiracy against him.

She listened to him and said nothing, till he would burst out in abuse:

"You women that have been in business simply ain't fit to be married. You think you're too good to help a man. Yes, even when you haven't been anything but dub stenographers. I never noticed that you were such a whale of a success! I don't suppose you remember how you used to yawp to me about the job being too much for you! And yet when I want a little sympathy you sit there and hand me the frozen stare like you were the president of the Standard Oil Company and I was a bum office-boy. Yes, sir, I tell you business simply unfits a skirt for marriage."

"No," she said, "not for marriage that has any love and comradeship in it. But I admit a business woman doesn't care to put up with being a cow in a stable."

"What the devil do you mean—"

"Maybe," she went on, "the business women will bring about a new kind of marriage in which men will have to keep up respect and courtesy.... I wonder—I wonder how many millions of women in what are supposed to be happy homes are sick over being chambermaids and mistresses till they get dulled and used to it. Nobody will ever know. All these books about women being emancipated—you'd think marriage had changed entirely. Yet, right now, in 1912, in Panama and this hotel—not changed a bit. The business women must simply compel men to—oh, to shave!"

She went out (perhaps she slammed the door a little, in an unemancipated way) to Mrs. Wade's room.

That discussion was far more gentle and coherent than most of their quarrels.

It may have been rather to the credit of Mr. Schwirtz—it may have been a remnant of the clean pride which the boy Eddie Schwirtz must once have had, that, whenever she hinted that she would like to go back to work—he raged: "So you think I can't support you, eh? My God! I can stand insults from all my old friends—the fellas that used to be tickled to death to have me buy 'em a drink, but now they dodge around the corner as though they thought I was going to try to borrow four bits from 'em—I can stand their insults, but, by God! it is pretty hard on a man when his own wife lets him know that she don't think he can support her!"

And he meant it.

She saw that, felt his resentment. But she more and more often invited an ambition to go back to work, to be independent and busy, no matter how weary she might become. To die, if need be, in the struggle. Certainly that death would be better than being choked in muck.... One of them would have to go to work, anyway.

She discovered that an old acquaintance of his had offered him an eighteen-dollar-a-week job as a clerk in a retail paint-shop, till he should find something better. Mr. Schwirtz was scornful about it, and his scorn, which had once intimidated Una, became grotesquely absurd to her.

Then the hotel-manager came with a curt ultimatum: "Pay up or get out," he said.

Mr. Schwirtz spent an hour telephoning to various acquaintances, trying to raise another hundred dollars. He got the promise of fifty. He shaved, put on a collar that for all practical purposes was quite clean, and went out to collect his fifty as proudly as though he had earned it.

Una stared at herself in the mirror over the bureau, and said, aloud: "I don't believe it! It isn't you, Una Golden, that worked, and paid your debts. You can't, dear, you simply can't be the wife of a man who lives by begging—a dirty, useless, stupid beggar. Oh, no, no! You wouldn't do that—you couldn't marry a man like that simply because the job had exhausted you. Why, you'd die at work first. Why, if you married him for board and keep, you'd be a prostitute—you'd be marrying him just because he was a 'good provider.' And probably, when he didn't provide any more, you'd be quitter enough to leave him—maybe for another man. You couldn't do that. I don't believe life could bully you into doing that.... Oh, I'm hysterical; I'm mad. I can't believe I am what I am—and yet I am!... Now he's getting that fifty and buying a drink—"

Sec. 4

Mr. Schwirtz actually came home with forty-five out of the fifty intact. That was because he wanted to be able to pay the hotel-manager and insultingly inform him that they were going to leave.... The manager bore up under the blow.... They did move to a "furnished housekeeping-room" on West Nineteenth Street—in the very district of gray rooms and pathetic landladies where Una had sought a boarding-house after the death of her mother.

As furnished housekeeping-rooms go, theirs was highly superior. Most of them are carpetless, rusty and small of coal-stove, and filled with cockroaches and the smell of carbolic acid. But the maison Schwirtz was almost clean. It had an impassioned green carpet, a bedspring which scarcely sagged at all, a gas-range, and at least a dozen vases with rococo handles and blobs of gilt.

"Gee! this ain't so bad," declared Mr. Schwirtz. "We can cook all our eats here, and live on next to nothing per, till the big job busts loose."

With which he prepared to settle down to a life of leisure. He went out and bought a pint of whisky, a pound of steak, a pound of cheese, a loaf of bread, six cigars, and for her a bar of fudge.

So far as Una could calculate, he had less than forty dollars. She burst out on him. She seemed to be speaking with the brusque voice of an accomplishing man. In that voice was all she had ever heard from executives; all the subconsciously remembered man-driving force of the office world. She ordered him to go and take the job in the paint-shop—at eighteen dollars a week, or eight dollars a week. She briefly, but thoroughly, depicted him as alcohol-soaked, poor white trash. She drove him out, and when he was gone she started to make their rooms presentable, with an energy she had not shown for months. She began to dust, to plan curtains for the room, to plan to hide the bric-a-brac, to plan to rent a typewriter and get commercial copying to do.

If any one moment of life is more important than the others, this may have been her crisis, when her husband had become a begging pauper and she took charge; began not only to think earnest, commonplace, little Una thoughts about "mastering life," but actually to master it.



CHAPTER XVIII

So long as Mr. Schwirtz contrived to keep his position in the retail paint-store, Una was busy at home, copying documents and specifications and form-letters for a stenographic agency and trying to make a science of quick and careful housework.

She suspected that, now he had a little money again, Mr. Schwirtz was being riotous with other women—as riotous as one can be in New York on eighteen dollars a week, with debts and a wife to interfere with his manly pleasures. But she did not care; she was getting ready to break the cocoon, and its grubbiness didn't much matter.

Sex meant nothing between them now. She did not believe that she would ever be in love again, in any phase, noble or crude. While she aspired and worked she lived like a nun in a cell. And now that she had something to do, she could be sorry for him. She made the best possible dinners for him on their gas-range. She realized—sometimes, not often, for she was not a contemplative seer, but a battered woman—that their marriage had been as unfair to him as it was to her. In small-town boy-gang talks behind barns, in clerkly confidences as a young man, in the chatter of smoking-cars and provincial hotel offices, he had been trained to know only two kinds of women, both very complaisant to smart live-wires: The bouncing lassies who laughed and kissed and would share with a man his pleasures, such as poker and cocktails, and rapid motoring to no place in particular; and the meek, attentive, "refined" kind, the wives and mothers who cared for a man and admired him and believed whatever he told them about his business.

Una was of neither sort for him, though for Walter Babson she might have been quite of the latter kind. Mr. Schwirtz could not understand her, and she was as sorry for him as was compatible with a decided desire to divorce him and wash off the stain of his damp, pulpy fingers with the water of life.

But she stayed home, and washed and cooked, and earned money for him—till he lost his retail-store position by getting drunk and being haughty to a customer.

Then the chrysalis burst and Una was free again. Free to labor, to endeavor—to die, perhaps, but to die clean. To quest and meet whatever surprises life might hold.

Sec. 2

She couldn't go back to Troy Wilkins's, nor to Mr. S. Herbert Ross and the little Pemberton stenographers who had enviously seen her go off to be married. But she made a real business of looking for a job. While Mr. Schwirtz stayed home and slept and got mental bed-sores and drank himself to death—rather too slowly—on another fifty dollars which he had borrowed after a Verdun campaign, Una was joyous to be out early, looking over advertisements, visiting typewriter companies' employment agencies.

She was slow in getting work because she wanted twenty dollars a week. She knew that any firm taking her at this wage would respect her far more than if she was an easy purchase.

Work was slow to come, and she, who had always been so securely above the rank of paupers who submit to the dreadful surgery of charity, became afraid. She went at last to Mamie Magen.

Mamie was now the executive secretary of the Hebrew Young Women's Professional Union. She seemed to be a personage. In her office she had a secretary who spoke of her with adoring awe, and when Una said that she was a personal friend of Miss Magen the secretary cried: "Oh, then perhaps you'd like to go to her apartment, at —— Washington Place. She's almost always home for tea at five."

The small, tired-looking Una, a business woman again, in her old tailor-made and a new, small hat, walked longingly toward Washington Place and tea.

In her seven years in New York she had never known anybody except S. Herbert Ross who took tea as a regular function. It meant to her the gentlest of all forms of distinction, more appealing than riding in motors or going to the opera. That Mamie Magen had, during Una's own experience, evolved from a Home Club girl to an executive who had tea at her apartment every afternoon was inspiriting; meeting her an adventure.

An apartment of buff-colored walls and not bad prints was Mamie's, small, but smooth; and taking tea in a manner which seemed to Una impressively suave were the insiders of the young charity-workers' circle. But Mamie's uncouth face and eyes of molten heroism stood out among them all, and she hobbled over to Una and kissed her. When the cluster had thinned, she got Una aside and invited her to the "Southern Kitchen," on Washington Square.

Una did not speak of her husband. "I want to get on the job again, and I wish you'd help me. I want something at twenty a week (I'm more than worth it) and a chance to really climb," was all she said, and Mamie nodded.

And so they talked of Mrs. Harriet Fike of the Home Club, of dreams and work and the fight for suffrage. Una's marriage slipped away—she was ardent and unstained again.

Mamie's nod was worth months of Mr. Schwirtz's profuse masculine boasts. Within ten days, Mamie's friend, Mr. Fein, of Truax & Fein, the real-estate people, sent for Una and introduced her to Mr. Daniel T. Truax. She was told to come to work on the following Monday as Mr. Truax's secretary, at twenty-one dollars a week.

She went home defiant, determined to force her husband to let her take the job.... She didn't need to use force. He—slippered and drowsy by the window—said: "That's fine; that'll keep us going till my big job breaks. I'll hear about it by next week, anyway. Then, in three-four weeks you can kick Truax & Fein in the face and beat it. Say, girlie, that's fine! Say, tell you what I'll do. Let's have a little party to celebrate. I'll chase out and rush a growler of beer and some wienies—"

"No! I've got to go out again."

"Can't you stop just long enough to have a little celebration? I—I been kind of lonely last few days, little sister. You been away so much, and I'm too broke to go out and look up the boys now."

He was peering at her with a real wistfulness, but in the memory of Mamie Magen, the lame woman of the golden heart, Una could not endure his cackling enthusiasm about the job he would probably never get.

"No, I'm sorry—" she said, and closed the door. From the walk she saw him puzzled and anxious at the window. His face was becoming so ruddy and fatuous and babyish. She was sorry for him—but she was not big enough to do anything about it. Her sorrow was like sympathy for a mangy alley cat which she could not take home.

She had no place to go. She walked for hours, planlessly, and dined at a bakery and lunch-room in Harlem. Sometimes she felt homeless, and always she was prosaically footsore, but now and then came the understanding that she again had a chance.



CHAPTER XIX

So, toward the end of 1912, when she was thirty-one years old, Mrs. Una Golden Schwirtz began her business career, as confidential secretary to Mr. Truax, of Truax & Fein.

Her old enemy, routine, was constantly in the field. Routine of taking dictation, of getting out the letters, prompting Mr. Truax's memory as to who Mrs. A was, and what Mr. B had telephoned, keeping plats and plans and memoes in order, making out cards regarding the negotiations with possible sellers of suburban estates. She did not, as she had hoped, always find this routine one jolly round of surprises. She was often weary, sometimes bored.

But in the splendor of being independent again and of having something to do that seemed worth while she was able to get through the details that never changed from day to day. And she was rewarded, for the whole job was made fascinating by human contact. She found herself enthusiastic about most of the people she met at Truax & Fein's; she was glad to talk with them, to work with them, to be taken seriously as a brain, a loyalty, a woman.

By contrast with two years of hours either empty or filled with Schwirtz, the office-world was of the loftiest dignity. It may have been that some of the men she met were Schwirtzes to their wives, but to her they had to be fellow-workers. She did not believe that the long hours, the jealousies, the worry, or Mr. Truax's belief that he was several planes above ordinary humanity, were desirable or necessary parts of the life at Truax & Fein's. Here, too, she saw nine hours of daily strain aging slim girls into skinny females. But now her whole point of view was changed. Instead of looking for the evils of the business world, she was desirous of seeing in it all the blessings she could; and, without ever losing her belief that it could be made more friendly, she was, nevertheless, able to rise above her own personal weariness and see that the world of jobs, offices, business, had made itself creditably superior to those other muddled worlds of politics and amusement and amorous Schwirtzes. She believed again, as in commercial college she had callowly believed, that business was beginning to see itself as communal, world-ruling, and beginning to be inspired to communal, kingly virtues and responsibility.

Looking for the good (sometimes, in her joy of escape, looking for it almost with the joy of an S. Herbert Ross in picking little lucrative flowers of sentiment along the roadside) she was able to behold more daily happiness about her.

Fortunately, Truax & Fein's was a good office, not too hard, not too strained and factional like Pemberton's; not wavering like Troy Wilkins's. Despite Mr. Truax's tendency to courteous whining, it was doing its work squarely and quietly. That was fortunate. Offices differ as much as office-managers, and had chance condemned Una to another nerve-twanging Pemberton's her slight strength might have broken. She might have fallen back to Schwirtz and the gutter.

Peaceful as reapers singing on their homeward path now seemed the teasing voices of men and girls as, in a group, they waited for the elevator at five-thirty-five. The cheerful, "Good-night, Mrs. Schwirtz!" was a vesper benediction, altogether sweet with its earnest of rest and friendship.

Tranquillity she found when she stayed late in the deserted office. Here no Schwirtz could reach her. Here her toil counted for something in the world's work—in the making of suburban homes for men and women and children. She sighed, and her breast felt barren, as she thought of the children. But tranquillity there was, and a brilliant beauty of the city as across dark spaces of evening were strung the jewels of light, as in small, French restaurants sounded desirous violins. On warm evenings of autumn Una would lean out of the window and be absorbed in the afterglow above the North River: smoke-clouds from Jersey factories drifting across the long, carmine stain, air sweet and cool, and the yellow-lighted windows of other skyscrapers giving distant companionship. She fancied sometimes that she was watching the afterglow over a far northern lake, among the pines; and with a sigh more of content than of restlessness she turned back to her work.... Time ceased to exist when she worked alone. Of time and of the office she was manager. What if she didn't go out to dinner till eight? She could dine whenever she wanted to. If a clumsy man called Eddie Schwirtz got hungry he could get his own dinner. What if she did work slowly? There were no telephone messages, no Mr. Truax to annoy her. She could be leisurely and do the work as it should be done.... She was no longer afraid of the rustling silence about her, as Una Golden had been at Troy Wilkins's. She was a woman now, and trained to fill the blank spaces of the deserted office with her own colored thoughts.

Hours of bustling life in the daytime office had their human joys as well. Una went out of her way to be friendly with the ordinary stenographers, and, as there was no vast Pembertonian system of caste, she succeeded, and had all the warmth of their little confidences. Nor after her extensive experience with Messrs. Schwirtz, Sanderson, and McCullough, did even the noisiest of the salesmen offend her. She laughed at the small signs they were always bringing in and displaying: "Oh, forget it! I've got troubles of my own!" or, "Is that you again? Another half hour gone to hell!" The sales-manager brought this latter back from Philadelphia and hung it on his desk, and when the admiring citizenry surrounded it, Una joined them.... As a married woman she was not expected to be shocked by the word, "hell!"...

But most beautiful was Christmas Eve, when all distinctions were suspended for an hour before the office closed, when Mr. Truax distributed gold pieces and handshakes, when "Chas.," the hat-tilted sales-manager, stood on a chair and sang a solo. Mr. Fein hung holly on all their desks, and for an hour stenographers and salesmen and clerks and chiefs all were friends.

When she went home to Schwirtz she tried to take some of the holiday friendship. She sought to forget that he was still looking for the hypothetical job, while he subsisted on her wages and was increasingly apologetic. She boasted to herself that her husband hated to ask her for money, that he was large and strong and masculine.

She took him to dinner at the Pequoit, in a room of gold and tapestry. But he got drunk, and wept into his sherbet that he was a drag on her; and she was glad to be back in the office after Christmas.

Sec. 2

The mist of newness had passed, that confusion of the recent arrival in office or summer hotel or revengeful reception; and she now saw the office inhabitants as separate people. She wondered how she could ever have thought that the sales-manager and Mr. Fein were confusingly alike, or have been unable to get the salesmen's names right.

There was the chief, Mr. Daniel T. Truax, usually known as "D. T.," a fussily courteous whiner with a rabbity face (his pink nose actually quivered), a little yellow mustache, and a little round stomach. Himself and his business he took very seriously, though he was far less tricky than Mr. Pemberton. The Real Estate Board of Trade was impressed by his unsmiling insistence on the Dignity of the Profession, and always asked him to serve on committees. It was Mr. Truax who bought the property for sub-development, and though he had less abstract intelligence than Mr. Fein, he was a better judge of "what the people want"; of just how high to make restrictions on property, and what whim would turn the commuters north or south in their quest for homes.

There was the super-chief, the one person related to the firm whom Una hated—Mrs. D. T. Truax. She was not officially connected with the establishment, and her office habits were irregular. Mostly they consisted in appearing at the most inconvenient hours and asking maddening questions. She was fat, massaged, glittering, wheezy-voiced, nagging. Una peculiarly hated Mrs. Truax's nails. Una's own finger-tips were hard with typing; her manicuring was a domestic matter of clipping and hypocritical filing. But to Mrs. Truax manicuring was a life-work. Because of much clipping of the cuticle, the flesh at the base of each nail had become a noticeably raised cushion of pink flesh. Her nails were too pink, too shiny, too shapely, and sometimes they were an unearthly white at the ends, because of nail-paste left under them. At that startling whiteness Una stared all the while Mrs. Truax was tapping her fingers and prying into the private morals of the pretty hall-girl, and enfilading Una with the lorgnon that so perfectly suited her Upper West Side jowls.

Collating Mrs. Truax and the matrons of the Visiting Board of the Temperance Home Club, Una concluded that women trained in egotism, but untrained in business, ought to be legally enjoined from giving their views to young women on the job.

The most interesting figure in the office was Mr. Fein, the junior partner, a Harvard Jew, who was perfectly the new type of business man. Serious, tall, spectacled, clean-shaven, lean-faced, taking business as a profession, and kindly justice as a religion, studying efficiency, but hating the metamorphosis of clerks into machines, he was the distinction and the power of Truax & Fein. At first Una had thought him humorless and negligible, but she discovered that it was he who pulled Mr. Truax out of his ruts, his pious trickeries, his cramping economies. She found that Mr. Fein loved books and the opera, and that he could be boyish after hours.

Then the sales-manager, that driving but festive soul, Mr. Charles Salmond, whom everybody called "Chas."—pronounced "Chaaz"—a good soul who was a little tiresome because he was so consistently an anthology of New York. He believed in Broadway, the Follies, good clothes, a motor-car, Palm Beach, and the value of the Salvation Army among the lower classes. When Mr. Fein fought for real beauty in their suburban developments it was Chas. who echoed all of New York by rebelling, "We aren't in business for our health—this idealistic game is O. K. for the guys that have the cash, but you can't expect my salesmen to sell this Simplicity and High-Thinking stuff to prospects that are interested in nothing but a sound investment with room for a garage and two kids."

Sixty or seventy salesmen, clerks, girls—these Una was beginning to know.

Finally, there was a keen, wide-awake woman, willing to do anything for anybody, not forward, but not to be overridden—a woman with a slight knowledge of architecture and a larger knowledge of the way of promotion; a woman whom Una took seriously; and the name of this paragon was Mrs. Una Golden Schwirtz.

Round these human islands flowed a sea of others. She had a sense of flux, and change, and energy; of hundreds of thousands of people rushing about her always—crowds on Broadway and Fifth Avenue and Sixth, and on Thirty-fourth Street, where stood the Zodiac Building in which was the office. Crowds in the hall of the Zodiac Building, examining the black-and-white directory board with its list of two hundred offices, or waiting to surge into one of the twelve elevators—those packed vertical railroads. A whole village life in the hallway of the Zodiac Building: the imperial elevator-starter in a uniform of blue and gold, and merely regal elevator-runners with less gold and more faded blue; the oldest of the elevator-boys, Harry, the Greek, who knew everybody in the building; the cigar-stand, with piles of cigarettes, cans of advertised tobacco, maple fudge wrapped in tinfoil, stamps, and even a few cigars, also the keeper thereof, an Italian with an air of swounding romance. More romantic Italians in the glass-inclosed barber-shop—Desperate Desmond devils, with white coats like undress uniforms, and mustaches that recalled the Riviera and baccarat and a secret-service count; the two manicure-girls of the barber-shop, princesses reigning among admirers from the offices up-stairs; janitors, with brooms, and charwomen with pails, and a red, sarcastic man, the engineer, and a meek puppet who was merely the superintendent of the whole thing.... Una watched these village people, to whom the Zodiac hall was Main Street, and in their satisfied conformation to a life of marble floors and artificial light she found such settled existence as made her feel at home in this town, with its eighteen strata called floors. She, too, at least during the best hours of the day, lived in the Zodiac Building's microcosm.

And to her office penetrated the ever flowing crowds—salesmen, buyers of real estate, inquirers, persons who seemed to have as a hobby the collection of real-estate folders. Indeed, her most important task was the strategy of "handling callers"—the callers who came to see Mr. Truax himself, and were passed on to Una by the hall-girl. To the clever secretary the management of callers becomes a question of scientific tactics, and Una was clever at it because she liked people.

She had to recognize the type of awkward shabby visitor who looks like a beggar, but has in his pocket the cash for investment in lots. And the insinuating caller, with tailor-made garments and a smart tie, who presents himself as one who yearns to do a good turn to his dear, dear personal friend, Mr. D. T. Truax, but proves to be an insurance-agent or a salesman of adding-machines. She had to send away the women with high-pitched voices and purely imaginary business, who came in for nothing whatever, and were willing to spend all of their own time and Mr. Truax's in obtaining the same; women with unsalable houses to sell or improbable lots to buy, dissatisfied clients, or mere cranks—old, shattered, unhappy women, to whom Una could give sympathy, but no time.... She was expert at standing filially listening to them at the elevator, while all the time her thumb steadily pressed the elevator signal.

Una had been trained, perhaps as much by enduring Mr. Schwirtz as by pleasing Mr. S. Herbert Ross, to be firm, to say no, to keep Mr. Truax's sacred rites undisturbed. She did not conventionally murmur, "Mr. Truax is in a conference just now, and if you will tell me the nature of your business—" Instead, she had surprising, delightful, convincing things for Mr. Truax to be doing, just at that particular moment—

From Mr. Truax himself she learned new ways of delicately getting rid of people. He did not merely rise to indicate that an interview was over, but also arranged a system of counterfeit telephone-calls, with Una calling up from the outside office, and Mr. Truax answering, "Yes, I'll be through now in just a moment," as a hint for the visitor. He even practised such play-acting as putting on his hat and coat and rushing out to greet an important but unwelcome caller with, "Oh, I'm so sorry I'm just going out—late f' important engagement—given m' secretary full instructions, and I know she'll take care of you jus' as well as I could personally," and returning to his private office by a rear door.

Mr. Truax, like Mr. S. Herbert Ross, gave Una maxims. But his had very little to do with stars and argosies, and the road to success, and vivisection, and the abstract virtues. They concerned getting to the office on time, and never letting a customer bother him if an office salesman could take care of the matter.

So round Una flowed all the energy of life; and she of the listening and desolate hotel room and the overshadowing storm-clouds was happy again.

She began to make friendships. "Chas.," the office-manager, stopped often at her desk to ridicule—and Mr. Fein to praise—the plans she liked to make for garden-suburbs which should be filled with poets, thatched roofs, excellent plumbing, artistic conversation, fireplaces, incinerators, books, and convenient trains.

"Some day," said Mr. Fein to her, "we'll do that sort of thing, just as the Sage Foundation is doing it at Forest Hills." And he smiled encouragingly.

"Some day," said Mr. Truax, "when you're head of a women's real-estate firm, after you women get the vote, and rusty, old-fashioned people like me are out of the way, perhaps you can do that sort of thing." And he smiled encouragingly.

"Rot," said Chas., and amiably chucked her under the chin.



CHAPTER XX

Truax & Fein was the first firm toward which Una was able to feel such loyalty as is supposed to distinguish all young aspirants—loyalty which is so well spoken of by bosses, and which is so generally lacking among the bossed. Partly, this was her virtue, partly it was the firm's, and partly it was merely the accident of her settling down.

She watched the biological growth of Truax & Fein with fascination; was excited when they opened a new subdivision, and proudly read the half-page advertisements thereof in the Sunday newspapers.

That loyalty made her study real estate, not merely stenography; for to most stenographers their work is the same whether they take dictation regarding real estate, or book-publishing, or felt slippers, or the removal of taconite. They understand transcription, but not what they transcribe. She read magazines—System, Printer's Ink, Real Estate Record (solemnly studying "Recorded Conveyances," and "Plans Filed for New Construction Work," and "Mechanics' Liens"). She got ideas for houses from architectural magazines, garden magazines, women's magazines. But what most indicated that she was a real devotee was the fact that, after glancing at the front-page headlines, the society news, and the joke column in her morning paper, she would resolutely turn to "The Real Estate Field."

On Sundays she often led Mr. Schwirtz for a walk among the new suburban developments.... For always, no matter what she did at the office, no matter how much Mr. Truax depended on her or Mr. Fein praised her, she went home to the same cabbage-rose-carpeted housekeeping-room, and to a Mr. Schwirtz who had seemingly not stirred an inch since she had left him in the morning.... Mr. Schwirtz was of a harem type, and not much adapted to rustic jaunting, but he obediently followed his master and tried to tell stories of the days when he had known all about real estate, while she studied model houses, the lay of the land, the lines of sewers and walks.

That was loyalty to Truax & Fein as much as desire for advancement.

And that same loyalty made her accept as fellow-workers even the noisiest of the salesmen—and even Beatrice Joline.

Though Mr. Truax didn't "believe in" women salesmen, one woman briskly overrode his beliefs: Miss Beatrice Joline, of the Gramercy Park Jolines, who cheerfully called herself "one of the nouveau pauvre," and condescended to mere Upper West Side millionaires, and had to earn her frocks and tea money. She earned them, too; but she declined to be interested in office regulations or office hours. She sold suburban homes as a free lance, and only to the very best people. She darted into the office now and then, slender, tall, shoulder-swinging, an exclamation-point of a girl, in a smart, check suit and a Bendel hat. She ignored Una with a coolness which reduced her to the status of a new stenographer. All the office watched Miss Joline with hypnotized envy. Always in offices those who have social position outside are observed with secret awe by those who have not.

Once, when Mr. Truax was in the act of persuading an unfortunate property-owner to part with a Long Island estate for approximately enough to buy one lot after the estate should be subdivided into six hundred lots, Miss Joline had to wait. She perched on Una's desk, outside Mr. Truax's door, swung her heels, inspected the finger-ends of her chamois gloves, and issued a command to Una to perform conversationally.

Una was thinking, "I'd like to spank you—and then I'd adore you. You're what story-writers call a thoroughbred."

While unconscious that a secretary in a tabby-gray dress and gold eye-glasses was venturing to appraise her, Miss Joline remarked, in a high, clear voice: "Beastly bore to have to wait, isn't it! I suppose you can rush right in to see Mr. Truax any time you want to, Mrs. Ummmmm."

"Schwirtz. Rotten name, isn't it?" Una smiled up condescendingly.

Miss Joline stopped kicking her heels and stared at Una as though she might prove to be human, after all.

"Oh no, it's a very nice name," she said. "Fancy being called Joline. Now Schwirtz sounds rather like Schenck, and that's one of the smartest of the old names.... Uh, would it be too much trouble to see if Mr. Truax is still engaged?"

"He is.... Miss Joline, I feel like doing something I've wanted to do for some time. Of course we both know you think of me as 'that poor little dub, Mrs. What's-her-name, D. T.'s secretary—'"

"Why, really—"

"—or perhaps you hadn't thought of me at all. I'm naturally quite a silent little dub, but I've been learning that it's silly to be silent in business. So I've been planning to get hold of you and ask you where and how you get those suits of yours, and what I ought to wear. You see, after you marry I'll still be earning my living, and perhaps if I could dress anything like you I could fool some business man into thinking I was clever."

"As I do, you mean," said Miss Joline, cheerfully.

"Well—"

"Oh, I don't mind. But, my dear, good woman—oh, I suppose I oughtn't to call you that."

"I don't care what you call me, if you can tell me how to make a seventeen-fifty suit look like Vogue. Isn't it awful, Miss Joline, that us lower classes are interested in clothes, too?"

"My dear girl, even the beautiful, the accomplished Beatrice Joline—I'll admit it—knows when she is being teased. I went to boarding-school, and if you think I haven't ever been properly and thoroughly, and oh, most painstakingly told what a disgusting, natural snob I am, you ought to have heard Tomlinson, or any other of my dear friends, taking me down. I rather fancy you're kinder-hearted than they are; but, anyway, you don't insult me half so scientifically."

"I'm so sorry. I tried hard— I'm a well-meaning insulter, but I haven't the practice."

"My dear, I adore you. Isn't it lovely to be frank? When us females get into Mr. Truax's place we'll have the most wonderful time insulting each other, don't you think? But, really, please don't think I like to be rude. But you see we Jolines are so poor that if I stopped it all my business acquaintances would think I was admitting how poor we are, so I'm practically forced to be horrid. Now that we've been amiable to each other, what can I do for you?... Does that sound business-like enough?"

"I want to make you give me some hints about clothes. I used to like terribly crude colors, but I've settled down to tessie things that are safe—this gray dress, and brown, and black."

"Well, my dear, I'm the best little dressmaker you ever saw, and I do love to lay down the law about clothes. With your hair and complexion, you ought to wear clear blues. Order a well-made—be sure it's well-made, no matter what it costs. Get some clever little Jew socialist tailor off in the outskirts of Brooklyn, or some heathenish place, and stand over him. A well-made tailored suit of not too dark navy blue, with matching blue crepe de Chine blouses with nice, soft, white collars, and cuffs of crepe or chiffon—and change 'em often."

"What about a party dress? Ought I to have satin, or chiffon, or blue net, or what?"

"Well, satin is too dignified, and chiffon too perishable, and blue net is too tessie. Why don't you try black net over black satin? You know there's really lots of color in black satin if you know how to use it. Get good materials, and then you can use them over and over again—perhaps white chiffon over the black satin."

"White over black?"

Though Miss Joline stared down with one of the quick, secretive smiles which Una hated, the smile which reduced her to the rank of a novice, her eyes held Miss Joline, made her continue her oracles.

"Yes," said Miss Joline, "and it isn't very expensive. Try it with the black net first, and have soft little folds of white tulle along the edge of the decolletage—it's scarcely noticeable, but it does soften the neck-line. And wear a string of pearls. Get these Artifico pearls, a dollar-ninety a string.... Now you see how useful a snob is to the world! I'd never give you all this god-like advice if I didn't want to advertise what an authority I am on 'Smart Fashions for Limited Incomes.'"

"You're a darling," said Una.

"Come to tea," said Miss Joline.

They did go to tea. But before it, while Miss Joline was being voluble with Mr. Truax, Una methodically made notes on the art of dress and filed them for future reference. Despite the fact that, with the support of Mr. Schwirtz as her chief luxury, she had only sixteen dollars in the world, she had faith that she would sometime take a woman's delight in dress, and a business woman's interest in it.... This had been an important hour for her, though it cannot be authoritatively stated which was the more important—learning to dress, or learning not to be in awe of a Joline of Gramercy Park.

They went to tea several times in the five months before the sudden announcement of Miss Joline's engagement to Wally Castle, of the Tennis and Racquet Club. And at tea they bantered and were not markedly different in their use of forks or choice of pastry. But never were they really friends. Una, of Panama, daughter of Captain Golden, and wife of Eddie Schwirtz, could comprehend Walter Babson and follow Mamie Magen, and even rather despised that Diogenes of an enameled tub, Mr. S. Herbert Ross; but it seemed probable that she would never be able to do more than ask for bread and railway tickets in the language of Beatrice Joline, whose dead father had been ambassador to Portugal and friend to Henry James and John Hay.