Sec. 2

It hurt a little, but Una had to accept the fact that Beatrice Joline was no more likely to invite her to the famous and shabby old house of the Jolines than was Mrs. Truax to ask her advice about manicuring. They did, however, have dinner together on an evening when Miss Joline actually seemed to be working late at the office.

"Let's go to a Cafe des Enfants," said Miss Joline. "Such a party! And, honestly, I do like their coffee and the nice, shiny, bathroom walls."

"Yes," said Una, "it's almost as much of a party to me as running a typewriter.... Let's go Dutch to the Martha Washington."

"Verra well. Though I did want buckwheats and little sausages. Exciting!"

"Huh!" said Una, who was unable to see any adventurous qualities in a viand which she consumed about twice a week.

Miss Joline's clean litheness, her gaiety that had never been made timorous or grateful by defeat or sordidness, her whirlwind of nonsense, blended in a cocktail for Una at dinner. Schwirtz, money difficulties, weariness, did not exist. Her only trouble in the entire universe was the reconciliation of her admiration for Miss Joline's amiable superiority to everybody, her gibes at the salesmen, and even at Mr. Truax, with Mamie Magen's philanthropic socialism. (So far as this history can trace, she never did reconcile them.)

She left Miss Joline with a laugh, and started home with a song—then stopped. She foresaw the musty room to which she was going, the slatternly incubus of a man. Saw—with just such distinctness as had once dangled the stiff, gray scrub-rag before her eyes—Schwirtz's every detail: bushy chin, stained and collarless shirt, trousers like old chair-covers. Probably he would always be like this. Probably he would never have another job. But she couldn't cast him out. She had married him, in his own words, as a "good provider." She had lost the bet; she would be a good loser—and a good provider for him.... Always, perhaps.... Always that mass of spoiled babyhood waiting at home for her.... Always apologetic and humble—she would rather have the old, grumbling, dominant male....

She tried to push back the moment of seeing him again. Her steps dragged, but at last, inevitably, grimly, the house came toward her. She crept along the moldy hall, opened the door of their room, saw him—

She thought it was a stranger, an intruder. But it was veritably her husband, in a new suit that was fiercely pressed and shaped, in new, gleaming, ox-blood shoes, with a hair-cut and a barber shave. He was bending over the bed, which was piled with new shirts, Afro-American ties, new toilet articles, and he was packing a new suit-case.

He turned slowly, enjoying her amazement. He finished packing a shirt. She said nothing, standing at the door. Teetering on his toes and watching the effect of it all on her, he lighted a large cigar.

"Some class, eh?" he said.

"Well—"

"Nifty suit, eh? And how are those for swell ties?"

"Very nice.... From whom did you borrow the money?"

"Now that cer'nly is a nice, sweet way to congratulate friend hubby. Oh, sure! Man lands a job, works his head off getting it, gets an advance for some new clothes he's simply got to have, and of course everybody else congratulates him—everybody but his own wife. She sniffs at him—not a word about the new job, of course. First crack outa the box, she gets busy suspecting him, and says, 'Who you been borrowing of now?' And this after always acting as though she was an abused little innocent that nobody appreciated—"

He was in mid-current, swimming strong, and waving his cigar above the foaming waters, but she pulled him out of it with, "I am sorry. I ought to have known. I'm a beast. I am glad, awfully glad you've got a new job. What is it?"

"New company handling a new kind of motor for row-boats—converts 'em to motor-boats in a jiffy—outboard motors they call 'em. Got a swell territory and plenty bonus on new business."

"Oh, isn't that fine! It's such a fine surprise—and it's cute of you to keep it to surprise me with all this while—"

"Well, 's a matter of fact, I just got on to it to-day. Ran into Burke McCullough on Sixth Avenue, and he gave me the tip."

"Oh!" A forlorn little "Oh!" it was. She had pictured him proudly planning to surprise her. And she longed to have the best possible impression of him, because of a certain plan which was hotly being hammered out in her brain. She went on, as brightly as possible:

"And they gave you an advance? That's fine."

"Well, no, they didn't, exactly, but Burke introduced me to his clothier, and I got a swell line of credit."

"Oh!"

"Now for the love of Pete, don't go oh-ing and ah-ing like that. You've handed me the pickled visage since I got the rowdy-dow on my last job—good Lord! you acted like you thought I liked to sponge on you. Now let me tell you I've kept account of every red cent you've spent on me, and I expect to pay it back."

She tried to resist her impulse, but she couldn't keep from saying, as nastily as possible: "How nice. When?"

"Oh, I'll pay it back, all right, trust you for that! You won't fail to keep wising me up on the fact that you think I'm a drunken bum. You'll sit around all day in a hotel and take it easy and have plenty time to figger out all the things you can roast me for, and then spring them on me the minute I get back from a trip all tired out. Like you always used to."

"Oh, I did not!" she wailed.

"Sure you did."

"And what do you mean by my sitting around, from now on—"

"Well, what the hell else are you going to do? You can't play the piano or maybe run an aeroplane, can you?"

"Why, I'm going to stay on my job, of course, Ed."

"You are not going-to-of-course-stay-on-your-job-Ed, any such a thing. Lemme tell you that right here and now, my lady. I've stood just about all I'm going to stand of your top-lofty independence and business airs—as though you weren't a wife at all, but just as 'be-damned-to-you' independent as though you were as much of a business man as I am! No, sir, you'll do what I say from now on. I've been tied to your apron strings long enough, and now I'm the boss—see? Me!" He tapped his florid bosom. "You used to be plenty glad to go to poker parties and leg-shows with me, when I wanted to, but since you've taken to earning your living again you've become so ip-de-dee and independent that when I even suggest rushing a growler of beer you scowl at me, and as good as say you're too damn almighty good for Eddie Schwirtz's low-brow amusements. And you've taken to staying out all hours—course it didn't matter whether I stayed here without a piece of change, or supper, or anything else, or any amusements, while you were out whoop-de-doodling around— You said it was with women!"

She closed her eyes tight; then, wearily: "You mean, I suppose, that you think I was out with men."

"Well, I ain't insinuating anything about what you been doing. You been your own boss, and of course I had to take anything off anybody as long as I was broke. But lemme tell you, from now on, no pasty-faced female is going to rub it in any more. You're going to try some of your own medicine. You're going to give up your rotten stenographer's job, and you're going to stay home where I put you, and when I invite you to come on a spree you're going to be glad—"

Her face tightened with rage. She leaped at him, shook him by the shoulder, and her voice came in a shriek:

"Now that's enough. I'm through. You did mean to insinuate I was out with men. I wasn't—but that was just accident. I'd have been glad to, if there'd been one I could have loved even a little. I'd have gone anywhere with him—done anything! And now we're through. I stood you as long as it was my job to do it. God! what jobs we women have in this chivalrous world that honors women so much!—but now that you can take care of yourself, I'll do the same."

"What d' yuh mean?"

"I mean this."

She darted at the bed, yanked from beneath it her suit-case, and into it began to throw her toilet articles.

Mr. Schwirtz sat upon the bed and laughed enormously.

"You women cer'nly are a sketch!" he caroled. "Going back to mamma, are you? Sure! That's what the first Mrs. Schwirtz was always doing. Let's see. Once she got as far as the depot before she came back and admitted that she was a chump. I doubt if you get that far. You'll stop on the step. You're too tightwad to hire a taxi, even to try to scare me and make it unpleasant for me."

Una stopped packing, stood listening. Now, her voice unmelodramatic again, she replied:

"You're right about several things. I probably was thoughtless about leaving you alone evenings—though it is not true that I ever left you without provision for supper. And of course you've often left me alone back there in the hotel while you were off with other women—"

"Now who's insinuating?" He performed another characteristic peroration. She did not listen, but stood with warning hand up, a small but plucky-looking traffic policeman, till he ceased, then went on:

"But I can't really blame you. Even in this day when people like my friend Mamie Magen think that feminism has won everything, I suppose there must still be a majority of men like you—men who've never even heard of feminism, who think that their women are breed cattle. I judge that from the conversations I overhear in restaurants and street-cars, and these pretty vaudeville jokes about marriage that you love so, and from movie pictures of wives beating husbands, and from the fact that women even yet haven't the vote. I suppose that you don't really know many men besides the mucky cattle-drover sort, and I can't blame you for thinking like them—"

"Say, what is all this cattle business about? I don't seem to recall we were discussing stockyards. Are you trying to change the conversation, so you won't even have to pack your grip before you call your own bluff about leaving me? Don't get it at all, at all!"

"You will get it, my friend!... As I say, I can see—now it's too late—how mean I must have been to you often. I've probably hurt your feelings lots of times—"

"You have, all right."

"—but I still don't see how I could have avoided it. I don't blame myself, either. We two simply never could get together—you're two-thirds the old-fashioned brute, and I'm at least one-third the new, independent woman. We wouldn't understand each other, not if we talked a thousand years. Heavens alive! just see all these silly discussions of suffrage that men like you carry on, when the whole thing is really so simple: simply that women are intelligent human beings, and have the right—"

"Now who mentioned suffrage? If you'll kindly let me know what you're trying to get at, then—"

"You see? We two never could understand each other! So I'm just going to clean house. Get rid of things that clutter it up. I'm going, to-night, and I don't think I shall ever see you again, so do try to be pleasant while I'm packing. This last time.... Oh, I'm free again. And so are you, you poor, decent man. Let's congratulate each other."

Sec. 3

Despite the constant hammering of Mr. Schwirtz, who changed swiftly from a tyrant to a bewildered orphan, Una methodically finished her packing, went to a hotel, and within a week found in Brooklyn, near the Heights, a pleasant white-and-green third-floor-front.

Her salary had been increased to twenty-five dollars a week.

She bought the blue suit and the crepe de Chine blouse recommended by Miss Beatrice Joline. She was still sorry for Mr. Schwirtz; she thought of him now and then, and wondered where he had gone. But that did not prevent her enjoying the mirror's reflection of the new blouse.

Sec. 4

While he was dictating to Una, Mr. Truax monologized: "I don't see why we can't sell that Boutell family a lot. We wouldn't make any profit out of it, now, anyway—that's nearly eaten up by the overhead we've wasted on them. But I hate to give them up, and your friend Mr. Fein says that we aren't scientific salesmen if we give up the office problems that everybody takes a whack at and seems to fail on."

More and more Mr. Truax had been recognizing Una as an intelligence, and often he teased her regarding her admiration for Mr. Fein's efficiency. Now he seemed almost to be looking to her for advice as he plaintively rambled on:

"Every salesman on the staff has tried to sell this asinine Boutell family and failed. We've got the lots—give 'em anything from a fifteen-thousand-dollar-restriction, water-front, high-class development to an odd lot behind an Italian truck-farm. They've been considering a lot at Villa Estates for a month, now, and they aren't—"

"Let me try them."

"Let you try them?"

"Try to sell them."

"Of course, if you want to—in your own time outside. This is a matter that the selling department ought to have disposed of. But if you want to try—"

"I will. I'll try them on a Saturday afternoon—next Saturday."

"But what do you know about Villa Estates?"

"I walked all over it, just last Sunday. Talked to the resident salesman for an hour."

"That's good. I wish all our salesmen would do something like that."

All week Una planned to attack the redoubtable Boutells. She telephoned (sounding as well-bred and clever as she could) and made an appointment for Saturday afternoon. The Boutells were going to a matinee, Mrs. Boutell's grating voice informed her, but they would be pleased t' see Mrs. Schwirtz after the show. All week Una asked advice of "Chas.," the sales-manager, who, between extensive exhortations to keep away from selling—"because it's the hardest part of the game, and, believe me, it gets the least gratitude"—gave her instructions in the tactics of "presenting a proposition to a client," "convincing a prospect of the salesman's expert knowledge of values," "clinching the deal," "talking points," and "desirability of location."

Wednesday evening Una went out to Villa Estates to look it over again, and she conducted a long, imaginary conversation with the Boutells regarding the nearness of the best school in Nassau County.

But on Saturday morning she felt ill. At the office she wailed on the shoulder of a friendly stenographer that she would never be able to follow up this, her first chance to advance.

She went home at noon and slept till four. She arrived at the Boutells' flat looking like a dead leaf. She tried to skip into the presence of Mrs. Boutell—a dragon with a frizz—and was heavily informed that Mr. Boutell wouldn't be back till six, and that, anyway, they had "talked over the Villa Estates proposition, and decided it wasn't quite time to come to a decision—be better to wait till the weather cleared up, so a body can move about."

"Oh, Mrs. Boutell, I just can't argue it out with you," Una howled. "I do know Villa Estates and its desirability for you, but this is my very first experience in direct selling, and as luck would have it, I feel perfectly terrible to-day."

"You poor lamb!" soothed Mrs. Boutell. "You do look terrible sick. You come right in and lie down and I'll have my Lithuanian make you a cup of hot beef-tea."

While Mrs. Boutell held her hand and fed her beef-tea, Una showed photographs of Villa Estates and became feebly oratorical in its praises, and when Mr. Boutell came home at six-thirty they all had a light dinner together, and went to the moving-pictures, and through them talked about real estate, and at eleven Mr. Boutell uneasily took the fountain-pen which Una resolutely held out to him, and signed a contract to purchase two lots at Villa Estates, and a check for the first payment.

Una had climbed above the rank of assistant to the rank of people who do things.



CHAPTER XXI

To Una and to Mr. Fein it seemed obvious that, since women have at least half of the family decision regarding the purchase of suburban homes, women salesmen of suburban property should be at least as successful as men. But Mr. Truax had a number of "good, sound, conservative" reasons why this should not be so, and therefore declined to credit the evidence of Una, Beatrice Joline, and saleswomen of other firms that it really was so.

Yet, after solving the Boutell office problem, Una was frequently requisitioned by "Chas." to talk to women about the advantages of sites for themselves and their children, while regular and intelligent (that is, male) salesmen worked their hypnotic arts on the equally regular and intelligent men of the families. Where formerly it had seemed an awesome miracle, like chemistry or poetry, to "close a deal" and bring thousands of dollars into the office, now Una found it quite normal. Responsibility gave her more poise and willingness to take initiative. Her salary was raised to thirty dollars a week. She banked two hundred dollars of commissions, and bought a Japanese-blue silk negligee, a wrist-watch, and the gown of black satin and net recommended by Miss Joline. Yet officially she was still Mr. Truax's secretary; she took his dictation and his moods.

Her greatest reward was in the friendship of the careful, diligent Mr. Fein.

Sec. 2

She never forgot a dinner with Mr. Fein, at which, for the first time, she heard a complete defense of the employer's position—saw the office world from the stand-point of the "bosses."

"I never believed I'd be friendly with one of the capitalists," Una was saying at their dinner, "but I must admit that you don't seem to want to grind the faces of the poor."

"I don't. I want to wash 'em."

"I'm serious."

"My dear child, so am I," declared Mr. Fein. Then, apparently addressing his mixed grill, he considered: "It's nonsense to say that it's just the capitalists that ail the world. It's the slackers. Show me a man that we can depend on to do the necessary thing at the necessary moment without being nudged, and we'll keep raising him before he has a chance to ask us, even."

"No, you don't—that is, I really think you do, Mr. Fein, personally, but most bosses are so afraid of a big pay-roll that they deliberately discourage their people till they lose all initiative. I don't know; perhaps they're victims along with their employees. Just now I adore my work, and I do think that business can be made as glorious a profession as medicine, or exploring, or anything, but in most offices, it seems to me, the biggest ideal the clerks have is safety—a two-family house on a stupid street in Flatbush as a reward for being industrious. Doesn't matter whether they enjoy living there, if they're just secure. And you do know—Mr. Truax doesn't, but you do know—that the whole office system makes pale, timid, nervous people out of all the clerks—"

"But, good heavens! child, the employers have just as hard a time. Talk about being nervous! Take it in our game. The salesman does the missionary work, but the employer is the one who has to worry. Take some big deal that seems just about to get across—and then falls through just when you reach for the contract and draw a breath of relief. Or say you've swung a deal and have to pay your rent and office force, and you can't get the commission that's due you on an accomplished sale. And your clerks dash in and want a raise, under threat of quitting, just at the moment when you're wondering how you'll raise the money to pay them their present salaries on time! Those are the things that make an employer a nervous wreck. He's got to keep it going. I tell you there's advantages in being a wage-slave and having the wages coming—"

"But, Mr. Fein, if it's just as hard on the employers as it is on the employees, then the whole system is bad."

"Good Lord! of course it's bad. But do you know anything in this world that isn't bad—that's anywhere near perfect? Except maybe Bach fugues? Religion, education, medicine, war, agriculture, art, pleasure, anything—all systems are choked with clumsy, outworn methods and ignorance—the whole human race works and plays at about ten-per-cent. efficiency. The only possible ground for optimism about the human race that I can see is that in most all lines experts are at work showing up the deficiencies—proving that alcohol and war are bad, and consumption and Greek unnecessary—and making a beginning. You don't do justice to the big offices and mills where they have real efficiency tests, and if a man doesn't make good in one place, they shift him to another."

"There aren't very many of them. In all the offices I've ever seen, the boss's indigestion is the only test of employees."

"Yes, yes, I know, but that isn't the point. The point is that they are making such tests—beginning to. Take the schools where they actually teach future housewives to cook and sew as well as to read aloud. But, of course, I admit the very fact that there can be and are such schools and offices is a terrible indictment of the slatternly schools and bad-tempered offices we usually do have, and if you can show up this system of shutting people up in treadmills, why go to it, and good luck. The longer people are stupidly optimistic, the longer we'll have to wait for improvements. But, believe me, my dear girl, for every ardent radical who says the whole thing is rotten there's ten clever advertising-men who think it's virtue to sell new brands of soap-powder that are no better than the old brands, and a hundred old codgers who are so broken into the office system that they think they are perfectly happy—don't know how much fun in life they miss. Still, they're no worse than the adherents to any other paralyzed system. Look at the comparatively intelligent people who fall for any freak religious system and let it make their lives miserable. I suppose that when the world has no more war or tuberculosis, then offices will be exciting places to work in—but not till then. And meantime, if the typical business man with a taste for fishing heard even so mild a radical as I am, he'd sniff, 'The fellow don't know what he's talking about; everybody in all the offices I know is perfectly satisfied.'"

"Yes, changes will be slow, I suppose, but that doesn't excuse bosses of to-day for thinking they are little tin gods."

"No, of course it doesn't. But people in authority always do that. The only thing we can do about it is for us, personally, to make our offices as clean and amusing as we can, instead of trying to buy yachts. But don't ever think either that capitalists are a peculiar race of fiends, different from anarchists or scrubwomen, or that we'll have a millennium about next election. We've got to be anthropological in our view. It's taken the human race about five hundred thousand years to get where it is, and presumably it will take quite a few thousand more to become scientific or even to understand the need of scientific conduct of everything. I'm not at all sure that there's any higher wisdom than doing a day's work, and hoping the Subway will be a little less crowded next year, and in voting for the best possible man, and then forgetting all the Weltschmertz, and going to an opera. It sounds pretty raw and crude, doesn't it? But living in a world that's raw and crude, all you can do is to be honest and not worry."

"Yes," said Una.

She grieved for the sunset-colored ideals of Mamie Magen, for the fine, strained, hysterical enthusiasms of Walter Babson, as an enchantment of thought which she was dispelling in her effort to become a "good, sound, practical business woman." Mr. Fein's drab opportunist philosophy disappointed her. Yet, in contrast to Mr. Schwirtz, Mr. Truax, and Chas., he was hyperbolic; and after their dinner she was gushingly happy to be hearing the opportunist melodies of "Il Trovatore" beside him.

Sec. 3

The Merryton Realty Company had failed, and Truax & Fein were offered the small development property of Crosshampton Hill Gardens at so convenient a price that they could not refuse it, though they were already "carrying" as many properties as they could easily handle. In a characteristic monologue Mr. Truax asked a select audience, consisting of himself, his inkwell, and Una, what he was to do.

"Shall I try to exploit it and close it out quick? I've got half a mind to go back to the old tent-and-brass-band method and auction it off. The salesmen have all they can get away with. I haven't even a good, reliable resident salesman I could trust to handle it on the grounds."

"Let me try it!" said Una. "Give me a month's trial as salesman on the ground, and see what I can do. Just run some double-leaded classified ads. and forget it. You can trust me; you know you can. Why, I'll write my own ads., even: 'View of Long Island Sound, and beautiful rolling hills. Near to family yacht club, with swimming and sailing.' I know I could manage it."

Mr. Truax pretended not to hear, but she rose, leaned over his desk, stared urgently at him, till he weakly promised: "Well, I'll talk it over with Mr. Fein. But you know it wouldn't be worth a bit more salary than you're getting now. And what would I do for a secretary?"

"I don't worry about salary. Think of being out on Long Island, now that spring is coming! And I'll find a successor and train her."

"Well—" said Mr. Truax, while Una took her pencil and awaited dictation with a heart so blithe that she could scarcely remember the symbols for "Yours of sixteenth instant received."



CHAPTER XXII

Of the year and a half from March, 1914, to the autumn of 1915, which Una spent on Long Island, as the resident salesman and director of Crosshampton Hill Gardens, this history has little to say, for it is a treatise regarding a commonplace woman on a job, and at the Gardens there was no job at all, but one long summer day of flushed laughter. It is true that "values were down on the North Shore" at this period, and sales slow; it is true that Una (in high tan boots and a tweed suit from a sporting-goods house) supervised carpenters in constructing a bungalow as local office and dwelling-place for herself. It is true that she quarreled with the engineer planning the walks and sewers, usurped authority and discharged him, and had to argue with Mr. Truax for three hours before he sustained her decision. Also, she spent an average of nine hours a day in waiting for people or in showing them about, and serving tea and biscuits to dusty female villa-hunters. And she herself sometimes ran a lawn-mower and cooked her own meals. But she had respect, achievement, and she ranged the open hills from the stirring time when dogwood blossoms filled the ravines with a fragrant mist, round the calendar, and on till the elms were gorgeous with a second autumn, and sunsets marched in naked glory of archangels over the Connecticut hills beyond the flaming waters of Long Island Sound. Slow-moving, but gentle, were the winter months, for she became a part of the commuting town of Crosshampton Harbor, not as the negligible daughter of a Panama Captain Golden, but as a woman with the glamour of independence, executive position, city knowledge, and a certain marital mystery. She was invited to parties at which she obediently played bridge, to dances at the Harbor Yacht Club, to meetings of the Village Friendly Society. A gay, easy-going group, with cocktail-mixers on their sideboards, and motors in their galvanized-iron garages, but also with savings-bank books in the drawers beneath their unit bookcases, took her up as a woman who had learned to listen and smile. And she went with them to friendly, unexacting dances at the Year-Round Inn, conducted by Charley Duquesne, in the impoverished Duquesne mansion on Smiley Point. She liked Charley, and gave him advice about bedroom chintzes for the inn, and learned how a hotel is provisioned and served. Charley did not know that her knowledge of chintzes was about two weeks old and derived from a buyer at Wanamacy's. He only knew that it solved his difficulties.

She went into the city about once in two weeks, just often enough to keep in touch with Truax, Fein, Chas., and Mamie Magen, the last of whom had fallen in love with a socialistic Gentile charities secretary, fallen out again, and was quietly dedicating all her life to Hebrew charities.

Una closed the last sale at Crosshampton Hill Gardens in the autumn of 1915, and returned to town, to the office-world and the job. Her record had been so clean and promising that she was able to demand a newly-created position—woman sales-manager, at twenty-five hundred dollars a year, selling direct and controlling five other women salesmen.

Mr. Truax still "didn't believe in" women salesmen, and his lack of faith was more evident now that Una was back in the office. Una grew more pessimistic as she realized that his idea of women salesmen was a pure, high, aloof thing which wasn't to be affected by anything happening in his office right under his nose. But she was too busy selling lots, instructing her women aides, and furnishing a four-room flat near Stuyvesant Park, to worry much about Mr. Truax. And she was sure that Mr. Fein would uphold her. She had the best of reasons for that assurance, namely, that Mr. Fein had hesitatingly made a formal proposal for her hand in marriage.

She had refused him for two reasons—that she already had one husband somewhere or other, and the more cogent reason that though she admired Mr. Fein, found him as cooling and pleasant as lemonade on a July evening, she did not love him, did not want to mother him, as she had always wanted to mother Walter Babson, and as, now and then, when he had turned to her, she had wanted to mother even Mr. Schwirtz.

The incident brought Mr. Schwirtz to her mind for a day or two. But he was as clean gone from her life as was Mr. Henry Carson, of Panama. She did not know, and did not often speculate, whether he lived or continued to die. If the world is very small, after all, it is also very large, and life and the world swallow up those whom we have known best, and they never come back to us.

Sec. 2

Una had, like a Freshman envying the Seniors, like a lieutenant in awe of the council of generals, always fancied that when she became a real executive with a salary of several thousands, and people coming to her for orders, she would somehow be a different person from the good little secretary. She was astonished to find that in her private office and her new flat, and in her new velvet suit she was precisely the same yearning, meek, efficient woman as before. But she was happier. Despite her memories of Schwirtz and the fear that some time, some place, she would encounter him and be claimed as his wife, and despite a less frequent fear that America would be involved in the great European war, Una had solid joy in her office achievements, in her flat, in taking part in the vast suffrage parade of the autumn of 1915, and feeling comradeship with thousands of women.

Despite Mr. Fein's picture of the woes of executives, Una found that her new power and responsibility were inspiring as her little stenographer's wage had never been. Nor, though she did have trouble with the women responsible to her at times, though she found it difficult to secure employees on whom she could depend, did Una become a female Troy Wilkins.

She was able to work out some of the aspirations she had cloudily conceived when she had herself been a slave. She did find it possible to be friendly with her aides, to be on tea and luncheon and gossip terms of intimacy with them, to confide in them instead of tricking them, to use frank explanations instead of arbitrary rules; and she was rewarded by their love and loyalty. Her chief quarrels were with Mr. Truax in regard to raising the salaries and commissions of her assistant saleswomen.

Behind all these discoveries regarding the state of being an executive, behind her day's work and the evenings at her flat when Mamie Magen and Mr. Fein came to dinner, there were two tremendous secrets:

For her personal life, her life outside the office, she had found a way out such as might, perhaps, solve the question of loneliness for the thousands of other empty-hearted, fruitlessly aging office-women. Not love of a man. She would rather die than have Schwirtz's clumsy feet trampling her reserve again. And the pleasant men who came to her flat were—just pleasant. No, she told herself, she did not need a man or man's love. But a child's love and presence she did need.

She was going to adopt a child. That was her way out.

She was thirty-four now, but by six of an afternoon she felt forty. Youth she would find—youth of a child's laughter, and the healing of its downy sleep.

She took counsel with Mamie Magen (who immediately decided to adopt a child also, and praised Una as a discoverer) and with the good housekeeping women she knew at Crosshampton Harbor. She was going to be very careful. She would inspect a dozen different orphan-asylums.

Meanwhile her second secret was making life pregnant with interest:

She was going to change her job again—for the last time she hoped. She was going to be a creator, a real manager, unhampered by Mr. Truax's unwillingness to accept women as independent workers and by the growing animosity of Mrs. Truax.

Sec. 3

Una's interest in the Year-Round Inn at Crosshampton Harbor, the results obtained by reasonably good meals and a little chintz, and her memory of the family hotel, had led her attention to the commercial possibilities of innkeeping.

She was convinced that, despite the ingenuity and care displayed by the managers of the great urban hotels and the clever resorts, no calling included more unimaginative slackers than did innkeeping. She had heard traveling-men at Pemberton's and at Truax & Fein's complain of sour coffee and lumpy beds in the hotels of the smaller towns; of knives and forks that had to be wiped on the napkins before using; of shirt-sleeved proprietors who loafed within reach of the cuspidors while their wives tried to get the work done.

She began to read the Hotel News and the Hotel Bulletin, and she called on the manager of a supply-house for hotels.

She read in the Bulletin of Bob Sidney, an ex-traveling-man, who, in partnership with a small capitalist, had started a syndicate of inns. He advertised: "The White Line Hotels. Fellow-drummers, when you see the White Line sign hung out, you know you're in for good beds and good coffee."

The idea seemed good to her. She fancied that traveling-men would go from one White Line Hotel to another. The hotels had been established in a dozen towns along the Pennsylvania Railroad, in Norristown, Reading, Williamsport, and others, and now Bob Sidney was promising to invade Ohio and Indiana. The blazed White Line across the continent caught Una's growing commercial imagination. And she liked several of Mr. Sidney's ideas: The hotels would wire ahead to others of the Line for accommodations for the traveler; and a man known to the Line could get credit at any of its houses, by being registered on identifying cards.

She decided to capture Mr. Sidney. She made plans.

In the spring she took a mysterious two weeks' leave of absence and journeyed through New York State, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. The woman who had quite recently regarded it as an adventure to go to Brooklyn was so absorbed in her Big Idea that she didn't feel self-conscious even when she talked to men on the train. If they smacked their lips and obviously said to themselves, "Gee! this is easy—not a bad little dame," she steered them into discussing hotels; what they wanted at hotels and didn't get; what was their favorite hotel in towns in from fifteen hundred to forty thousand inhabitants, and precisely what details made it the favorite.

She stayed at two or three places a day for at least one meal—hotels in tiny towns she had never heard of, and in larger towns that were fumbling for metropolitanism. She sought out all the summer resorts that were open so early. She talked to travelers, men and women; to hack-drivers and to grocers supplying hotels; to proprietors and their wives; to clerks and waitresses and bell-boys, and unconsidered, observant porters. She read circulars and the catalogues of furniture establishments.

Finally, she visited each of Mr. Bob Sidney's White Line Hotels. Aside from their arrangements for "accommodations" and credit, their superior cleanliness, good mattresses, and coffee with a real taste, she did not find them preferable to others. In their rows of cuspidors and shouldering desks, and barren offices hung with insurance calendars, and dining-rooms ornamented with portraits of decomposed ducks, they were typical of all the hotels she had seen.

On the train back to New York she formulated her suggestions for hotels, among which, in her own words, were the following:

"(1) Make the offices decent rooms—rem. living-room at Gray Wolf Lodge. Take out desks—guests to register and pay bills in small office off living-room—keep letters there, too. Not much room needed and can't make pleasant room with miserable old 'desk' sticking out into it.

"(2) Cut out the cuspidors. Have special room where drummers can play cards and tell stories and spit. Allow smoking in 'office,' but make it pleasant. Rem. chintz and wicker chairs at $3 each. Small round tables with reading-lamps. Maybe fireplace.

"(3) Better pastry and soup and keep coffee up to standard. One surprise in each meal—for example, novel form of eggs, good salad, or canned lobster cocktail. Rem. the same old pork, beans, cornbeef, steak, deadly cold boiled potato everywhere I went.

"(4) More attractive dining-rooms. Esp. small tables for 2 and 4. Cater more to local customers with a la carte menus—not long but good.

"(5) Women housekeepers and pay 'em good.

"(6) Hygienic kitchens and advertise 'em.

"(7) Train employees, as rem. trav. man told me United Cigar Stores do.

"(8) Better accom. for women. Rem. several traveling men's wives told me they would go on many trips w. husbands if they could get decent hotels in all these towns.

"(9) Not ape N. Y. hotels. Nix on gilt and palms and marble. But clean and tasty food, and don't have things like desks just because most hotels do."

Sec. 4

Three hours after Una reached New York she telephoned to the object of her secret commercial affections, the unconscious Mr. Robert Sidney, at the White Line Hotels office. She was so excited that she took ten minutes for calming herself before she telephoned. Every time she lifted the receiver from its hook she thrust it back and mentally apologized to the operator. But when she got the office and heard Mr. Bob Sidney's raw voice shouting, "Yas? This 's Mist' Sidney," Una was very cool.

"This is Mrs. Schwirtz, realty salesman for Truax & Fein. I've just been through Pennsylvania, and I stayed at your White Line Hotels. Of course I have to be an expert on different sorts of accommodations, and I made some notes on your hotels—some suggestions you might be glad to have. If you care to, we might have lunch together to-morrow, and I'll give you the suggestions."

"Why, uh, why—"

"Of course I'm rather busy with our new Long Island operations, so if you have a date to-morrow, the matter can wait, but I thought you'd better have the suggestions while they were fresh in my mind. But perhaps I can lunch with you week after next, if—"

"No, no, let's make it to-morrow."

"Very well. Will you call for me here—Truax & Fein, Zodiac Building?"

Una arose at six-thirty next morning, to dress the part of the great business woman, and before she went to the office she had her hair waved.

Mr. Bob Sidney called for her. He was a simple, energetic soul, with a derby on the back of his head, cheerful, clean-shaven, large-chinned, hoarse-voiced, rapidly revolving a chewed cigar. She, the commonplace, was highly evolved in comparison with Mr. Sidney, and there was no nervousness in her as she marched out in a twenty-dollar hat and casually said, "Let's go to the Waldorf—it's convenient and not at all bad."

On the way over Mr. Sidney fairly massaged his head with his agitated derby—cocked it over one eye and pushed it back to the crown of his head—in his efforts to find out what and why was Mrs. Una Schwirtz. He kept appraising her. It was obvious that he was trying to decide whether this mysterious telephone correspondent was an available widow who had heard of his charms. He finally stumbled over the grating beside the Waldorf and bumped into the carriage-starter, and dropped his dead cigar. But all the while Una steadily kept the conversation to the vernal beauties of Pennsylvania.

Thanks to rice powder and the pride of a new hat, she looked cool and adequate. But she was thinking all the time: "I never could keep up this Beatrice-Joline pose with Mr. Fein or Mr. Ross. Poor Una, with them she'd just have to blurt out that she wanted a job!"

She sailed up to a corner table by a window. The waiter gave the menu to Mr. Sidney, but she held out her hand for it. "This is my lunch. I'm a business woman, not just a woman," she said to Mr. Sidney; and she rapidly ordered a lunch which was shockingly imitative of one which Mr. Fein had once ordered for her.

"Prett' hot day for April," said Mr. Sidney.

"Yes.... Is the White Line going well?"

"Yump. Doing a land-office business."

"You're having trouble with your day clerk at Brockenfelt, I see."

"How juh know?"

"Oh—" She merely smiled.

"Well, that guy's a four-flush. Came to us from the New Willard, and to hear him tell it you'd think he was the guy that put the "will" in the Willard. But he's a credit-grabber, that's what he is. Makes me think— Nev' forget one time I was up in Boston and I met a coon porter and he told me he was a friend of the president of the Pullman Company and had persuaded him to put on steel cars. Bet a hat he believed it himself. That's 'bout like this fellow. He's going to get the razoo.... Gee! I hope you ain't a friend of his."

Una had perfectly learned the Boeotian dialect so strangely spoken by Mr. Sidney, and she was able to reply:

"Oh no, no indeed! He ought to be fired. He gave me a room as though he were the superintendent of a free lodging-house."

"But it's so hard to get trained employees that I hate to even let him go. Just to show you the way things go, just when I was trying to swing a deal for a new hotel, I had to bust off negotiations and go and train a new crew of chambermaids at Sandsonville myself. You'd died laughing to seen me making beds and teaching those birds to clean a spittador, beggin' your pardon, but it certainly was some show, and I do, by gum! know a traveling-man likes his bed tucked in at the foot! Oh, it's fierce! The traveling public kicks if they get bum service, and the help kick if you demand any service from 'em, and the boss gets it right in the collar-button both ways from the ace."

"Well, I'm going to tell you how to have trained service and how to make your hotels distinctive. They're good hotels, as hotels go, and you really do give people good coffee and good beds and credit conveniences, as you promise, but your hotels are not distinctive. I'm going to tell you how to make them so."

Una had waited till Mr. Sidney had disposed of his soup and filet mignon. She spoke deliberately, almost sternly. She reached for her new silver link bag, drew out immaculate typewritten schedules, and while he gaped she read to him precisely the faults of each of the hotels, her suggested remedies, and her general ideas of hotels, with less cuspidors, more originality, and a room where traveling-men could be at home on a rainy Sunday.

"Now you know, and I know," she wound up, "that the proprietor's ideal of a hotel is one to which traveling-men will travel sixty miles on Saturday evening, in order to spend Sunday there. You take my recommendations and you'll have that kind of hotels. At the same time women will be tempted there and the local trade will go there when wife or the cook is away, or they want to give a big dinner."

"It does sound like it had some possibilities," said Mr. Sidney, as she stopped for breath, after quite the most impassioned invocation of her life.

She plunged in again:

"Now the point of all this is that I want to be the general manager of certain departments of the Line—catering, service, decoration, and so on. I'll keep out of the financial end and we'll work out the buying together. You know it's women who make the homes for people at home, and why not the homes for people traveling?... I'm woman sales-manager for Truax & Fein—sell direct, and six women under me. I'll show you my record of sales. I've been secretary to an architect, and studied architecture a little. And plenty other jobs. Now you take these suggestions of mine to your office and study 'em over with your partner and we'll talk about the job for me by and by."

She left him as quickly as she could, got back to her office, and in a shaking spasm of weeping relapsed into the old, timorous Una.

Sec. 5

Tedious were the negotiations between Una and Mr. Sidney and his partner. They wanted her to make their hotels—and yet they had never heard of anything so nihilistic as actually having hotel "offices" without "desks." They wanted her, and yet they "didn't quite know about adding any more overhead at this stage of the game."

Meantime Una sold lots and studied the economical buying of hotel supplies. She was always willing to go with Mr. Sidney and his partner to lunch—but they were brief lunches. She was busy, she said, and she had no time to "drop in at their office." When Mr. Sidney once tried to hold her hand (not seriously, but with his methodical system of never failing to look into any possibilities), she said, sharply, "Don't try that—let's save a lot of time by understanding that I'm what you would call 'straight.'" He apologized and assured her that he had known she was a "high-class genuwine lady all the time."

The very roughness which, in Mr. Schwirtz, had abraised her, interested her in Mr. Sidney. She knew better now how to control human beings. She was fascinated by a comparison of her four average citizens—four men not vastly varied as seen in a street-car, yet utterly different to one working with them: Schwirtz, the lumbering; Troy Wilkins, the roaring; Truax, the politely whining; and Bob Sidney, the hesitating.

The negotiations seemed to arrive nowhere.

Then, unexpectedly, Bob Sidney telephoned to her at her flat one evening: "Partner and I have just decided to take you on, if you'll come at thirty-eight hundred a year."

Una hadn't even thought of the salary. She would gladly have gone to her new creative position at the three thousand two hundred she was then receiving. But she showed her new training and demanded:

"Four thousand two hundred."

"Well, split the difference and call it four thousand for the first year."

"All right."

Una stood in the center of the room. She had "succeeded on her job." Then she knew that she wanted some one with whom to share the good news.

She sat down and thought of her almost-forgotten plan to adopt a child.

Sec. 6

Mr. Sidney had, during his telephone proclamation, suggested: "Come down to the office to-morrow and get acquainted. Haven't got a very big force, you know, but there's a couple of stenographers, good girls, crazy to meet the new boss, and a bright, new Western fellow we thought we might try out as your assistant and publicity man, and there's an office-boy that's a sketch. So come down and meet your subjects, as the fellow says."

Una found the office, on Duane Street, to consist of two real rooms and a bare anteroom decorated with photographs of the several White Line Hotels—set on maple-lined streets, with the local managers, in white waistcoats, standing proudly in front. She herself was to have a big flat-topped desk in the same room with Mr. Sidney. The surroundings were crude compared with the Truax & Fein office, but she was excited. Here she would be a pioneer.

"Now come in the other room," said Mr. Sidney, "and meet the stenographers and the publicity man I was telling you about on the 'phone."

He opened a door and said, "Mrs. Schwirtz, wantcha shake hands with the fellow that's going to help you to put the Line on the map—Mr. Babson."

It was Walter Babson who had risen from a desk and was gaping at her.



CHAPTER XXIII

"But I did write to you, Goldie—once more, anyway—letter was returned to me after being forwarded all over New York," said Walter, striding about her flat.

"And then you forgot me completely."

"No, I didn't—but what if I had? You simply aren't the same girl I liked—you're a woman that can do things; and, honestly, you're an inspiration to me." Walter rubbed his jaw in the nervous way she remembered.

"Well, I hope I shall inspire you to stick to the White Line and make good."

"Nope, I'm going to make one more change. Gee! I can't go on working for you. The problem of any man working for a woman boss is hard enough. He's always wanting to give her advice and be superior, and yet he has to take her orders. And it's twice as hard when it's me working for you that I remember as a kid—even though you have climbed past me."

"Well?"

"Well, I'm going to work for you till I have a job where I can make good, and when I do—or if I do—I'm going to ask you to marry me."

"But, my dear boy, I'm a business woman. I'm making good right now. In three months I've boosted White Line receipts seventeen per cent., and I'm not going back to minding the cat and the gas-stove and waiting—"

"You don't need to. We can both work, keep our jobs, and have a real housekeeper—a crackajack maid at forty a month—to mind the cat."

"But you seem to forget that I'm more or less married already."

"So do you!... If I make good— Listen: I guess it's time now to tell you my secret. I'm breaking into your old game, real estate. You know I've been turning out pretty good publicity for the White Line, besides all the traveling and inspecting, and we have managed to have a few good times, haven't we? But, also, on the side, I've been doing a whale of a lot of advertising, and so on, for the Nassau County Investment Company, and they've offered me a steady job at forty-five a week. And now that I've got you to work for, my Wanderjahre are over. So, if I do make good, will you divorce that incubus of an Eddie Schwirtz and marry me? Will you?"

He perched on the arm of her chair, and again demanded: "Will you? You've got plenty legal grounds for divorcing him—and you haven't any ethical grounds for not doing it."

She said nothing. Her head drooped. She, who had blandly been his manager all day, felt managed when his "Will you?" pierced her, made her a woman.

He put his forefinger under her chin and lifted it. She was conscious of his restless, demanding eyes.

"Oh, I must think it over," she begged.

"Then you will!" he triumphed. "Oh, my soul, we've bucked the world—you've won, and I will win. Mr. and Mrs. Babson will be won'erfully happy. They'll be a terribly modern couple, both on the job, with a bungalow and a Ford and two Persian cats and a library of Wells, and Compton Mackenzie, and Anatole France. And everybody will think they're exceptional, and not know they're really two lonely kids that curl up close to each other for comfort.... And now I'm going home and do a couple miles publicity for the Nassau Company.... Oh, my dear, my dear—"

Sec. 2

"I will keep my job—if I've had this world of offices wished on to me, at least I'll conquer it, and give my clerks a decent time," the business woman meditated. "But just the same—oh, I am a woman, and I do need love. I want Walter, and I want his child, my own baby and his."

THE END