 CHAPTER IX Now that Walter had made a man's presence natural to her, Una needed a man, the excitation of his touch, the solace of his voice. She could not patiently endure a cloistered vacuousness. Even while she was vigorously representing to herself that he was preposterous, she was uneasily aware that Phil was masculine. His talons were strong. She could feel their clutch on her hands. He's a rat, and I do wish he wouldn't spit, she shuddered. But under her scorn was a surge of emotion. A man, not much of a man, yet a man, had wanted the contact of her hand, been eager to be with her. Sensations, vast as night or the ocean, whirled in her small white room. Desire and curiosity even more made her restless as a wave. She caught herself speculating as she plucked at the sleeve of her black morning waist. I wonder would I be more interesting if I had the orange and brown dress I was going to make when mother died. Oh, shame! Yet she sprang up from the white enameled rocker, tucked in her graceless cotton corset cover, stared at her image in the mirror, smoothed her neck till the skin reddened. Phil talked to her for an hour after their Sunday noon dinner. She had been to church, had confessed indeterminate sins to a formless and unresponsive deity. She felt righteous and showed it. Phil caught the cue. He sacrificed all the witty things he was prepared to say about Mrs. Gray's dumplings. He gazed silently out of the window till she wondered what he was thinking about. Then he stumblingly began to review a sermon which he said he had heard the previous Sunday, though he must have been mistaken, as he shot several games of Kelly pool every Sunday morning or slept till noon. The preacher spoke of woman's influence. You don't know what it is to lack a woman's influence in a fellow's life, Miss Golden. I can see the awful consequences among my patients. I tell you, when I sat there in church and saw the colored windows, he sighed portentously. His hand fell across hers, his lean paw strong and warm-blooded from massaging puffy old men. I tell you, I just got sentimental, I did, thinking of all I lacked. Phil melted mournfully away, to indulge in a highly cheerful walk on upper Broadway with Miss Becky Rosenthal, sower for the son's pure pants and overalls company, while in her room Una grieved over his forlorn desire to be good. Two evenings later, when November warmed to a passing Indian summer of golden skies that were pitifully far away from the little folk in city streets, Una was so restless that she set off for a walk by herself. Phil had been silent, glancing at her and away as though he were embarrassed. I wish I could do something to help him, she thought, as she poked downstairs to the entrance of the apartment house. Phil was on the steps, smoking a cigarette-sized cigar, scratching his chin and chattering with his kinsmen, the gutter sparrows. He doffed his derby. He spun his cigar from him with a deft flip of his fingers, which somehow agitated her. She called herself a little fool for being agitated, but she couldn't get rid of the thought that only men snap their fingers like that. Going to the movies, Miss Golden? No, I was just going for a little walk. Well, say, walks, that's where I live. Why don't you invite Uncle Phil to come along and show you the town? Why, I knew this burg when they went picnicking at the reservoir in Bryant Park. He swaggered beside her without an invitation. He did not give her a chance to decline his company, and soon she did not want to. He led her down to Gramercy Park, loveliest memory of village days, houses of a demure red and white ringing a fenced garden. He pointed out to her the Princeton Club, the Columbia Club, the National Arts, and the Players, and declared that two men leaving the last were John Drew and the most famous editor in America. He guided her over to Stuyvesant Park, a barren square out of old London, with a Quaker school on one side and the valuable ghetto on the other. He conducted her through east side streets, where Jewish lovers paraded past miles of push carts and venerable rabbis read the tall mood between sales of cotton socks and showed her a little café which was a hangout for thieves. She was excited by this contact with the underworld. He took her to a Lithuanian restaurant on a street which was a debacle. One half of the restaurant was filled with shaggy Lithuanians playing cards at filthy tables. The other half was a clean haunt for tourists who came to see the slums, and here, in the heart of these slums, saw only one another. Wait a while, Phil said, and a bunch of seeing New Yorkers will land here and think we're crooks. In ten minutes a vanload of sheepish trippers from the Middle West filed into the restaurant and tried to act as though they were used to cocktails. Una was delighted when she saw them secretly peering at Phil and herself. She put one hand on her thigh and one on the table, leaned forward and tried to look tough, while Phil pretended to be quarreling with her. In the trippers simple souls were enthralled by this glimpse of two criminals. Una really enjoyed the acting. For a moment Phil was her companion in play, and when the trippers had gone rustling out to view other haunts of vice, she smiled at Phil unrestrainedly. Instantly he took advantage of her smile of their companionship. He was really as simple-hearted as the trippers in his tactics. She had been drinking ginger ale. He urged her now to have a real drink. He muttered confidentially, have a nip of sherry or a New Orleans fizz or a bronx, that'll put heart into you. Not enough to affect you at all, but just enough to cheer up on. Then we'll go to a dance and really have a time. Gee, poor kid, you don't get any fun. No, no, I never touch it, she said, and she believed it, forgetting the claret she had drunk with Walter Babson. She felt unsafe. He laughed at her, assured her from his medical experience that lots of women need a little tonic, and boisterously ordered a glass of sherry for her. She merely sipped it. She wanted to escape. All their momentary frankness of association was gone. She feared him. She hated the complacent waiter who brought her the drink, the fat proprietor who would take his pieces of silver, though they were the price of her soul, the policeman on the pavement who would never think of protecting her, and the whole hideous city which benignly profited by saloons. She watched another couple down at the end of the room, an obese man and a young pretty girl who was hysterically drunk. Not because she had attended the Women's Christian Temperance Union at Panama and heard them condemn the demon rum, but because the sickish smell of the alcohol was all about her now, she suddenly turned into a crusader. She sprang up, seized her gloves, snapped, I will not touch the stuff. She marched down the room out of the restaurant in a way, not once looking back at Phil. In about fifteen seconds she had a humorous picture of Phil trying to rush after her, but stopped by the waiter to pay his check. She began to wonder if she hadn't been slightly ridiculous in attempting to slay demon rum by careering down the restaurant. But I don't care, she said stoutly. I'm glad I took a stand instead of just rambling along and wondering what it was all about, the way I did with Walter. Phil caught up to her and instantly began to complain. Say, you certainly made a sight out of yourself and out of me, leaving me sitting there with the waiter laughing his boob head off at me. Lord, I'll never dare go near the place again. Your own fault. His problem was so clear, so unconfused to her. It wasn't all my fault, he said. You didn't have to take a drink. His voice fell to a pathetic whimper. I was showing you hospitality the best way I knew how. You won't never know how you hurt my feelings. The problem instantly became complicated again. Perhaps she had hurt his rudimentary sense of courtesy. Perhaps Walter Babson would have sympathized with Phil, not with her. She peeped at Phil. He trailed along with a forlorn baby look which did not change. She was very uncomfortable as she said a brief good night at the flat. She half wished that he would give her a chance to recant. She saw him and his injured feelings as enormously important. She undressed in a tremor of misgiving. She put her thin, pretty kimono over her nightgown, braided her hair, and curled on the bed, condemning herself for having been so supercilious to the rat who had never had a chance. It was late, long after eleven, when there was a tapping on the door. She started, listened rigidly. Phil's voice whispered from the hall. Open your door just half an inch, Miss Golden, something I wanted to say. Her pity for him made his pleading request like a command. She drew her kimono close and peeped out at him. I knew you were up, he whispered, saw the light under your door. I'd been so worried. I didn't mean to shock you or nothing, but if you feel I did mean to, I want to apologize. Gee, me, I couldn't sleep one wink if I thought you was offended. It's all right, she began. Say, come into the dining room. Everybody gone to bed. I want to explain. Gee, you've got to give me a chance to be good. If you don't use no good influence over me, nobody never will, I guess. His whisper was full of masculine urgency, husky, bold. She shivered. She hesitated, did not answer. All right, he mourned. I don't blame you none, but it's pretty hard. I'll come just for a moment, she said, and shut the door. She was excited, flushed. She wrapped her braids around her head, gentle braids of pale gold and her undistinguished face, thus framed, was young and sweet. She hastened out to the dining room. What was the parlor, by day, the grays used for their own bedroom, but the dining room had a big, ugly leather seti and two rockers, and it served as a secondary living room. Here Phil waited at the end of the seti. She headed for a rocker, but he piled sofa cushions for her at the other end of the seti, and she obediently sank down there. "'Listen,' he said, in a tone of lofty lamentation, "'I don't know, as I can ever, ever, make you understand. I just wanted to give you a good time. I seen you was in mourning, and I think, maybe you could brighten her up a little. I'm sorry I didn't understand.' "'Oona, Oona, do you suppose you could ever stoop to helping a bad egg like me?' he demanded. His hand fell on hers. It comforted her chilly hand. She let it lie there. Speech became difficult for her. "'Why, why yes,' she stammered. In reaction to her scorn of him, she was all accepting faith. "'Oh, if you could, and if I could make you less lonely sometimes.' In his voice was a perilous tenderness, for the rat, trained to beguile neurotic patients in his absurd practice, could croon like the very mother of pity. "'Yes, I am lonely sometimes,' she heard herself admitting, far off, dreaming, needing the close affection that her mother and Walter had once given her. "'Poor little girl, you're so much better raised and educated than me, but you got to have friendship just same.' His arm was about her shoulder. For a second she leaned against him. All her scorn of him suddenly gathered in one impulse. She sprang up, just in time to catch a grin on his face. "'You gutter rat,' she said. "'You aren't worth my telling you what you are. You wouldn't understand. You can't see anything but the gutter.' He was perfectly unperturbed. "'Poor stuff, kid. Weak comeback. Sounds like a drama. But say, listen, honest kid, you got me wrong. What's the harm in a little hugging?' She fled. She was safe in her room. She stood with both arms outstretched. She did not feel soiled by this dirty thing. She was triumphant. In the silhouette of a water-tank atop the next-door apartment-house, she saw a strong tower of faith. "'Now I don't have to worry about him. I don't have to make any more decisions. I know. I'm through. No one can get me just because of curiosity about sex again. I'm free. I can fight my way through in business and still keep clean. I can. I was hungry for—for even that rat. I—Una Golden. Yes, I was. But I don't want to go back to him. I've won.' "'Oh, Walter, Walter, I do want you, dear, but I'll get along without you. And I'll keep a little sacred image of you.' End of Chapter 9, Part 2. Chapter 10. The three-fourths of Una employed in the office of Mr. Troy Wilkins was going through one of those periods of unchanging routine when all past drama seems unreal, when nothing novel happens nor apparently ever will happen, such a time of dull peacefulness as makes up the major part of our lives. Her only definite impressions were the details of daily work, the physical aspects of the office, and the presence of the boss. Day after day the same details of the job, letters arriving, assorted, opened, answered by dictation, the answers sealed and stamped, and almost every day the same panting crisis of getting off some cosmically important letter, the reception of callers, welcome to clients, considerate but firm assurances to persons looking for positions that there was no opening just at present, the swab answering of irritating telephone calls, the filing of letters and plans, the clipping of real estate transfer items from newspapers, the supervision of Bessie Craker and the office boy. Slightly fixed were the details of the grubby office itself. Like many men who have pride in the smartest suburban homes available, Mr. Wilkins was content with an office shabby and inconvenient. He regarded beautiful offices as in some way effeminate. His wasn't effeminate. It was undecorative as a filled ashtray, despite Una's daily following up of the careless scrub women with dust cloth and whisk. She knew every inch of it as a gardener knows his plot. She could never keep from noticing and running her finger along the pebbled glass of the oak and glass partition about Mr. Wilkins's private office. Each of the hundreds of times a day she passed it. And when she lay awake at midnight, her fingertips would recall precisely the feeling of that rough surface, even to the sharp edges of a tiny flaw in the glass over the bookcase. Or she would recall the floor rag, symbol of the hard realness of the office grind. It always hung over the twisted, bulbous lead pipes below the stationary basin in the women's washroom provided by the Septimus building for the women on three floors. It was a rag, ancient and slate gray, grotesquely stiff and grotesquely hairy at its frayed edges, a corpse of a scrub rag in rigor mortis. Una was annoyed with herself, forever observing so unlovely an object. But in the moment of relaxation, when she went to wash her hands, she was unduly sensitive to that eternal rag and to the griminess of the washroom, the cracked and yellow stained wash bowl, the cold water that stung in winter, the roller-towel which she spun round and round in the effort to find a dry, clean, square space till, in a spasm of revulsion, she would bolt out of the washroom with her face and hands half-dried. Woman's place is in the home. Una was doubtless, purely perverse in competing with men for the commercial triumphs of running that gray, wet towel round and round on its clattering roller and of wondering whether for the entire remainder of her life she would see that dead scrub rag. It was no less annoying a fact that Bessie and she had only one wastebasket which was invariably at Bessie's desk when Una reached for it, or that the door of the supply cupboard always shivered and stuck, or that on Thursday, which is the three p.m. of the week, it seemed impossible to endure the tedium till Saturday noon, and that invariably her money was gone by Friday, so that Friday lunch was always a mere insult to her hunger, and she could never get her gloves from the cleaner till after Saturday payday. Una knew the office to a point where it offered few beautiful surprises, and she knew the tactics of Mr. Troy Wilkins. All managers, bosses, chiefs, have tactics for keeping discipline, tricks which they conceive as profoundly hidden from their underlings, and which are intimately known and discussed by those underlings. There are the bosses who bluff, those who lie, those who give good fellowship or grave courtesy in lieu of wages. None of these was Mr. Wilkins. He was duly honest and clumsily paternal, but he was a roarer, a grumbler. He bawled and ordained in order to encourage industry and keep his lambs from asking for raises. Thus also he tried to conceal his own mistakes, when a missing letter for which everybody had been anxiously searching was found on his own desk instead of in the files. He would blare, well why didn't you tell me you put it on my desk, eh? He was a delayer also, and in poker patois a passer of the buck. He would feebly hold up a decision for weeks, then make a whole campaign of getting his office to rush through the task in order to catch up. Have a form of masculine commuter hysterics, because Una and Bessie didn't do the typing in a miraculously short time. He never cursed. He was an ecclesiastical believer that one of the chief aims of man is to keep from saying those mystic words hell and dam. But he could make darn it and why in Tunket sound as profane and as a gambling den. There was included in Una's duties the pretense of believing that Mr. Wilkins was the greatest single-handed villa architect in greater New York. Sometimes it nauseated her. But often he was rather pathetic in his shaky desire to go on having faith in his superseded ability, and she would willingly assure him that his rivals, the boisterous young firm of Sewell, Smith, and Fisselben, were frauds. All these faults and devices of Mr. Troy Wilkins Una knew. Doubtless he would have been astonished to hear that fact, on evenings in his plate-racked, much raftered, highly built-in suburban dining-room, when he'd discourse to the admiring Mrs. Wilkins and the mouse-like little Wilkins's on the art of office discipline, or mornings in the second smoker of the 816 train, when he told the other lords of the world that these stenographers are all alike, you simply can't get them to learn system. It is not recorded whether Mr. Wilkins also knew Una's faults, her habit of falling adreaming at 3.30, and trying to make it up by working furiously at 4.30, her habit of awing the good-hearted Bessie Craker by posing as a nun who had never been kissed nor ever wanted to be, her graft of sending the office boy out for ten-cent boxes of coconut candy, and a certain resentful touchiness and ladylikeness which made it hard to give her necessary orders. Mr. Wilkins has never given testimony, but he is not the villain of the tale, and some authorities have a suspicion that he did not find Una altogether perfect. It must not be supposed that Una, or her million sisters in business, were constantly and actively bored by office routine. Save once or twice a week when he roared, and once or twice a month when she felt that thirteen dollars a week was too little, she rather liked Mr. Wilkins, his honesty, his desire to make comfortable homes for people, his cheerful good-morning, his way of interrupting dictation to tell her antiquated but jolly stories, his stolid, dependable-looking face. She had real satisfaction in the game of work, in winning points and tricks and doing her work briskly and well, in helping Mr. Wilkins to capture clients. She was eager when she popped in to announce to him that a wary, long-pursued prospect had actually called. She was rather more interested in her day's work than are the average of meaningless humanity who sell gingham and teach algebra and cure boils and repair lawnmowers because she was daily more able to approximate perfection, to look forward to something better, to some splendid position at twenty or even twenty-five dollars a week. She was certainly in no worse plight than perhaps ninety-five million of her free and notoriously red-blooded fellow-citizens. But she was in no better plight. There was no drama, no glory in affection, nor, so long as she should be tied to Troy Wilkins's dwindling business, no immediate increase in power. And the sameness, the unceasing discussions with Bessie regarding Mr. Wilkins, Mr. Wilkins's hat, Mr. Wilkins's latest command, Mr. Wilkins's lost fountain pen, Mr. Wilkins's rudeness to the salesman for the Skyline Roofing Company, Mr. Wilkins's idiotic friendship for Muldoon, the contractor, Mr. Wilkins's pronounced unfairness to the office boy in regard to a certain lateness and arrival. At best, Una got through day after day. At worst, she was as profoundly bored as an explorer in the Arctic night. Una, the initiate New Yorker, continued her study of city ways and city currents during her lunch hours. She went down to Broad Street to see the curb market. Marvelled at the men with telephones and little coupes behind opened windows. Stared at the great newspaper offices on Park Row, the Old City Hall, the mingling on lower Broadway of sky-challenging buildings with the history of pre-revolutionary days. She got a momentary prejudice in favor of socialism from listening to an attack upon it by a noontime orator, a spotted, badly dressed man whose favorite slur regarding socialists was that they were spotted and badly dressed. She heard a negro shouting ditherambics about some religion she could never make out. Sometimes she lunched at a newspaper-covered desk with Bessie and the office boy on cold ham and beans and small bright-colored cakes which the boy brought in from a bakery. Sometimes she had boiled eggs and cocoa at a child's restaurant with stenographers who ate baked apples, rich Napoleon's, and, always, coffee. Sometimes at a cafeteria carrying a tray, she helped herself to crackers and milk and sandwiches. Sometimes at the ardent tea room, for women only, she encountered charity workers and virulently curious literary ladies whom she endured for the marked excellence of the ardent chicken croquettes. Sometimes Bessie tempted her to a Chinese restaurant where Bessie, who came from the east side and knew a trick or two, did not order chop suey like a tourist, but noodles and eggs-foo-young. In any case, the lunch hour and the catalog of what she was so vulgar as to eat were of importance in Una's history, because that hour broke the routine, gave her, for an hour, a deceptive freedom of will, of choice between Boston beans and New York beans. And her triumphant common sense was demonstrated, for she chose light, digestible food and kept her head clear for the afternoon, while her overlord, Mr. Troy Wilkins, like vast numbers of his fellow businessmen, crammed himself with beef steak and kidney pudding, drugged himself with cigar smoke and pots of strong coffee and shop talk, spoke earnestly of the wickedness of drunkenness, and then, drunk with food and tobacco and coffee and talk, came back dizzy, blur-eyed, slow-nerved, and for two hours tried to get down to work. After hours of trudging through routine, Una went home. She took the elevated now instead of the subway. That was important in her life. It meant an entire change of scenery. On the elevated, beside her all evening, hovering over her bed at night, was worry. Oh, I ought to have got all that Norris correspondence copied today. I must get at it first thing in the morning. I wonder if Mr. Wilkins was sore because I stayed out so long for lunch. What would I do if I were fired? So would she worry as she left the office. In the evening she wouldn't so much criticize herself as, suddenly and without reason, remember office settings and incidents, startle at a picture of the T-square at which she had stared while Mr. Wilkins was telephoning. She wasn't weary because she worried. She worried because she was weary from the airless, unnatural, straining life. She worried about everything available, from her soul to her fingernails, but the office offered the largest number of good opportunities. After all, say the syndicated philosophers, the office takes only eight or nine hours a day. The other fifteen or sixteen you are free to do as you wish. Loaf, study, become an athlete. This illuminative suggestion is usually reinforced by allusions to Lincoln and Edison. Only you aren't a Lincoln or an Edison for the most part and you don't do any of those improving things. You have the office with you, in you, every hour of the twenty-four unless you sleep dreamlessly and forget, which you don't. Probably, like Una, you do not take any exercise to drive work thoughts away. She often planned to take exercise regularly, read of it in women's magazines, but she could never get herself to keep up the earnest clowning of bedroom calisthenics. Gymnasiums were either reekingly crowded or too expensive, and even to think of undressing and dressing for a gymnasium demanded more initiative than was left in her fagged organism. There was walking, but city streets become tiresomely familiar. Of sports, she was consistently ignorant. So all the week she was in the smell and sound of the battle until Saturday evening with its blessed rest, the clean, relaxed time which every woman on the job knows. Saturday evening, no work tomorrow, a prospect of thirty-six hours of freedom, a leisurely dinner, a languorous slowness in undressing, a hot bath, a clean nightgown, and fresh, smooth bed linen. Una went to bed early to enjoy the contemplation of these luxuries. She even put on a lace bedcap adorned with pink silk roses, the pleasure of relaxing in bed, of looking lazily at the pictures in a new magazine, of drifting into slumber, not of stepping into a necessary sleep that was only the anti-room of another day's labor. Such was her greatest joy in this period of uneventfulness. Una was, she hoped, trying to think about things, naturally one who used that boarding-house phrase could not think transformingly. She wasn't illuminative about Romaine Rowland or Rodin or village welfare. She was still trying to decide whether the suffrage movement was ladylike and whether Dickens or Thackeray was the better novelist, but she really was trying to decide. She compiled little lists of books to read, movements to investigate. She made a somewhat incoherent written statement of what she was trying to do, and this she kept in her top bureau drawer among the ribbons, collars, imitation pearl necklaces, handkerchiefs, letters from Walter, and photographs of Panama and her mother. She took it out sometimes, and relieved the day's accumulated suffering by adding such notes as, Be nice and human with employees if ever have any of own. Office wretched whole anyway because of economic system. W used to say, why make worse by being cranky? Or, study music. It brings country and W and poetry and everything. Take piano lessons when get time. So una-tramped, weary always at dusk, but always recreated at dawn, through one of those periods of timeless, unmarked months, when all drama seems past and unreal, and apparently nothing will ever happen again. Then, in one week, everything became startling. She found melodrama and a place of friendship. End of Chapter 10. Part 2, Chapter 11 of The Job. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Job by Sinclair Lewis. Part 2, The Office. Chapter 11. I'm tired of the greys. They're very nice people, but they can't talk, said una to Bessie Craker at lunch in the office on a February day. How do you mean can't talk? Are they dummies? inquired Bessie. Dummies? Yeah, sure, deep and dumb. Why no, I mean they don't talk my language. They don't, oh, they don't, I suppose you'd say conversationalize, do you see? Oh, yes, said Bessie doubtfully. Say, listen, Miss Golden, say I don't want to butt in, and maybe you wouldn't be stuck on it much, but they say it's a dead swell place to live. Miss Kitson, the boss's secretary where I was before, lived there. Say for the love of Mike, say it, where? interrupted the office boy. You shut your nasty trap, I was just coming to it. The Temperance and Protection Home on Madison Avenue just above thirty-fourth. They say it's kind of strict, but, gee, there's a Oscar's each-net bunch of dames there, artists and everything, and they say they feed you swell, and it only costs eight bucks a week. Well, maybe I'll look at it, said Una dubiously. Neither the forbidding name nor Bessie's moral recommendation made the home for girls sound tempting, but Una was hungry for companionship. She was cold now toward the unvarying, unimaginative desires of men. Among the women, artists and everything, she might find the friends she needed. The Temperance and Protection Home Club for girls was in a solemn, five-story, white sandstone structure with a severe doorway of iron grill, solid and capable looking as a national bank. Una rang the bell diffidently. She waited in a hall that, despite its mission setee and red-tiled floor, was barrenly clean as a convent. She was admitted to the business-like office of Mrs. Harriet Fike, the matron of the home. Mrs. Fike had a brown, stringy neck and tan bangs. She wore a mannish coat and skirt, flat shoes of the kind called sensible, by everybody except pretty women, and a large silver-mounted crucifix. Well, she snarled, Someone, I'd like to find out about coming here to live, to see the place, and so on. Can you have somebody show me one of the rooms? My dear young lady, the first consideration isn't to have somebody show you or anybody else a room, but to ascertain if you are a fit person to come here. Mrs. Fike, jabbed at a compartment of her desk, yanked out a corduroy-bound book, boxed its ears, slammed it open, glared at Una in a Christian and home-like way, and began to shoot questions. What's your name? Una Golden. Miss or miss? I didn't quite. Miss or miss, as I said. Can't you understand English? Only here I'm not being sent to jail that I know of. Una rose tremblingly. Mrs. Fike merely waited and snapped. Sit down. You look as though you had enough sense to understand that we can't let people we don't know anything about enter a decent place like this. Miss or miss, as I said. Miss. Una murmured feebly, sitting down again. What's your denomination? No agnostics or Catholics allowed. Una heard herself meekly declaring, Methodist. Smoke, swear, drink liquor, got any bad habits? No. Got a lover, sweetheart, gentlemen friend, if so, what name or names? No. That's what they all say. Let me tell you that later, when you expect to have all these male cousins visit you, will reserve the privilege to ask questions. Ever served a jail sentence? Now really, do I look it? My dear miss, wouldn't you feel foolish if I said yes? Have you? I warn you, we look these things up. No, I have not. Well that's comforting. Age? Twenty-six. Parents living, name nearest relatives, nearest friends, present occupation? Even as she answered this last simple question, and Mrs. Fike's suspicious query about her salary, Una felt as though she were perjuring herself, as though there were no such place as Troy Wilkins's office, and Mrs. Fike knew it, as though a large policeman were secreted behind the desk and would at any moment pop out and drag her off to jail. She answered with tremorous carefulness. By now the one thing she wanted to do was to escape from that Christian and strictly supervise Napoleon, Mrs. Fike, and flee back to the grays. Previous history? Mrs. Fike was grimly continuing, and she followed this question by ascertaining Una's ambitions, health, record for insanity, and references. Mrs. Fike closed the query book and observed, well you are rather fresh, but you seem to be acceptable, and now you may look us over and see whether we are acceptable to you. Don't think for one moment that this institution needs you, or is trying to lift you out of a life of sin, or that we suppose this to be the only place in New York to live. We know what we want. We run things on a scientific basis, but we aren't so conceited as to think that everybody likes us. Now for example I can see that you don't like me in my ways one bit, but Lord love you that isn't necessary. The one thing necessary is for me to run this home according to the book, and if you're fool enough to prefer a slap-dash boarding house to this hygienic home why you'll make your bed, or rather some slattern of a landlady will make it, and you can lie in it. Come with me. No. Read the rules. Una obediently read that the young ladies of the temperance home were forbidden to smoke, make loud noises, cook or do laundry in their rooms, sit up after midnight, entertain visitors of any sort except mothers and sisters, in any place in the home, except in the parlors for that purpose provided. They were not permitted to be out after ten unless their names were specifically entered in the out late book before they're going, and they were requested to answer all reasonable questions of matron or board of visitors or duly qualified inspectors regarding moral, mental, physical and commercial well-being and progress. Una couldn't resist asking. I suppose it isn't forbidden to sleep in our rooms, is it? Mrs. Fike looked over her, through her, about her, and remarked, I'd advise you to drop all impudence. You see, you don't do it well. We admit Eastside Jews here, and they are so much quicker and wittier than you country girls from Pennsylvania and Oklahoma and heaven knows where, that you might just as well give up and try to be ladies instead of humorists. Come, we will take a look at the home. By now Una was resolved not to let Mrs. Fike drive her away. She would show her. She would come and live here just for spite. What Mrs. Fike thought has not been handed down. She led Una past a series of closets, each furnished with two straight chairs on either side of a table, a carbon print of a chili-looking cathedral, and a slice of carpet on which one was rather disappointed not to find the label, Bathmat. These are the reception rooms where the girls are allowed to receive callers. Any time, up to a quarter to ten, Mrs. Fike said, Una decided that they were better fitted for a hairdressing establishment. The living room was her first revelation of the temperance home as something besides a prison, as an abiding place for living, eager, sensitive girls. It was not luxurious, but it had been arranged by someone who made allowance for a weakness for pretty things, even on the part of young females observing the rules in a Christian home. There was a broad fireplace, built-in bookshelves, a long table, and, in wicker chairs with chintz cushions, were half a dozen curious girls. Una was sure that one of them, a fizzy-haired, laughing girl, secretly nodded to her, and she was comforted. Up the stairs to a marvelous bathroom with tempting shower baths, a small gymnasium, and, on the roof, a garden and lodger and basketball court. It was cool and fresh up here on even the hottest summer evenings, and here the girls were permitted to lounge in negligets till after ten, Mrs. Fike remarked, with a half smile. Una smiled back. As they went through the bedroom floors, with Mrs. Fike stalking ahead, a graceful girl in lace cap and negligee came bouncing out of a door between them, drew herself up and saluted Mrs. Fike's back, winked at Una amicably, and, for five steps, imitated Mrs. Fike's aggressive stride. Yes, I would be glad to come here, Una said cheerfully to Mrs. Fike, who looked at her suspiciously, but granted. Well, we'll look up your references. Meantime, if you like, or don't like, I suppose, you might talk to a Mrs. Esther Lawrence who wants a roommate. Oh, I don't think I'd like a roommate. My dear young lady, this place is simply full of young persons who would like and they wouldn't like, and forsooth we must change every plan to suit their high and mighty convenience. I'm not at all sure that we shall have a single room vacant for at least six months. And of course, well, could I talk to Mrs. Lawrence, was it? Most assuredly, I expect you to talk to her. Come with me. Una followed abjectly, and the matron seemed well pleased with her reformation of this wayward young woman. Her voice was curiously anemic, however, as she rapped on a bedroom door and called, Oh, Mrs. Lawrence, a husky capable voice within. Yeah, what is it? It's Mrs. Fike, dearie. I think I have a roommate for you. Well, you wait till I get something on, will you? Mrs. Fike waited. She waited two minutes. She looked at a wristwatch in a leather band while she tapped her sensibly clad foot. She tried again. Where waiting, dearie? There was no answer from within, and it was two minutes more before the door was opened. Una was conscious of a room pleasant with white enameled woodwork, a denim-covered couch and a narrow, primmed brass bed, a litter of lingerie and sheets of newspaper, and, as the dominating center of it all, a woman of thirty, tall, high-breasted, full-faced, with a nose that was large but pleasant, black eyes that were cool and direct and domineering. Mrs. Esther Lawrence. You kept us waiting so long, complained Mrs. Fike. Mrs. Lawrence stared at her as though she were an impudent servant. She revolved on Una, and with a self-confident kindliness in her voice, inquired, What's your name, child? Una Golden. We'll talk this over. Thank you, Mrs. Fike. Well now, Mrs. Fike endeavored, be sure you both are satisfied. Don't you worry, we will, all right. Mrs. Fike glared at her and retired. Mrs. Lawrence, grinned, stretched herself on the couch, mysteriously produced a cigarette and asked, Smoke, No thanks. Sit down, child, and be comfy. Oh, would you mind opening that window? Not supposed to smoke. Poor Ma Fike, I just can't help deviling her. Please, don't think I'm usually as nasty as I am with her. She has to be kept in her place, or she'll worry you to death. Thanks. Dude, sit down, waggle up the pillow on the bed, and be comfy. You look like a nice kid. Me? I'm a lazy, slatterly, good-natured old hex with all the bad habits there are, and a profound belief that the world is a hell of a place, but I'm fine to get along with, and so let's take a shot at rooming together. If we scrap, we can quit in stanter and no bad feelings. I'd really like to have you come in because you look as though you were on, even if you are rather meek and kitten-y, and I'm scared to death they'll wish some tough little mick onto me, or some pious sister who hasn't been married and believes in pussy-footing around and taking it all to God in prayer every time I tell her the truth. What do you think, Kitty? Una was, by this cocksure, disillusioned, large person, more delighted than by all the wisdom of Mr. Wilkins or the soothing of Mrs. Sessions. She felt that, except for Walter, it was the first time since she had come to New York that she had found an entertaining person. Yes, she said, do let's try it. Good. Now let me warn you, first off, that I may be diverting at times, but I'm no good. Tomorrow I'll pretend to be a misused and unfortunate victim, but your young and almost-trusting eyes make me feel candid for about fifteen minutes. I certainly got a raw deal from my beloved husband. That's all you'll hear from me about him. By the way, I'm typical of about ten thousand married women in business about whose noble spouses nothing is ever said. But I suppose I ought to have bucked up and made good in business. I'm a bum stenog for Pitcairn, McClure, and Stockley, the Bond House. But I can't. I'm too lazy, and it doesn't seem worthwhile. And oh, we are exploited, women who are on jobs. The bosses give us a lot of taffy and raise their hats, but they don't raise our wages, and they think that if they keep us till two GM taking dictation, they make it all right by apologizing. Men are a lot more conscientious on jobs than men are, but that's because we're fools. You don't catch the men staying till six thirty because the boss has shystered all afternoon and wants to catch up on his correspondence. But we, of course, we don't dare to make dates for dinner, lest we have to stay late. We don't dare. I bet you do. Yes, well, I'm not so much of a fool as some of the rest, or else more of a one. There's Mamie Magan, she's living here, she's with Pitcairn, too. You'll meet her and be crazy about her. She's a lame, Jewish, and awfully plain, except she's got lovely eyes, but she's got a mind like a tack. Well, she's the little angel pie about staying late, and some day she'll probably make four thousand bucks a year. She'll be mayor of New York, or executive secretary of the Young Women's Atheist Association or something. But still, she doesn't stay late and plug hard because she's scared, but because she's got ambition. But most of the women, Lord, they're just cowed sheep. Yes, said Una. A million discussions of women in business going on. A thousand of them at just that moment, perhaps. Men employers declaring that they couldn't depend on women in their offices, women asserting that women were the more conscientious. Una listened and was content. She had found someone with whom to play, with whom to talk, and hate the powers. She felt an impulse to tell Mrs. Lawrence all about Troy Wilkins and her mother, and perhaps even about Walter Babson. But she merely treasured up the thought that she could do that some day and politely asked, What about Mrs. Fike? Is she as bad as she seems? Why, that's the best little skeleton of contention around here. There's three factions. Some girls say she's just plain devil, mean as a floor-walker. That's what I think. She's a rotter and a foreflusher. You notice the way she crawls when I stand up to her. Why, they won't have Catholics here, and I'm one of those wicked people, and she knows it. When she asked my religion, I told her I was a Romanist Episcopalian, and she sniffed and put me down as an Episcopalian. I saw her. Then some of the girls think she's really good-hearted, just gruff, bark worse than her bite. But you ought to see how she barks at some of the younger girls, scares them stiff, and keeps picking on them about regulations, makes their lives miserable. Then there's a third section that thinks she's merely institutionalized. Training makes her as hard as any other kind of a machine. You'll find lots like her in this town, in all the charities. But the girls, they do have a good time here? Yes, they do. It's sort of fun to fight Ma Fike and all the fool rules. I enjoy smoking here twice as much as I would anywhere else. And Fike isn't half as bad as the Board of Visitors—a bunch of fat, rich, old Upper West Siders with pass-mentry bosoms doing tea-table charity and asking us impertinent questions and telling a bunch of hard-worked slaves to be virtuous and wash behind their ears the soft, ignorant, conceited, impractical parasites. But still, it's all sort of like a cranky, boarding school for girls. And you know what fun the girls have there, with midnight fudge parties and a teacher pussy-footing down the hall trying to catch them. I don't know. I've never been to one. Well, doesn't matter. Another thing—some day, when you come to know more men—know many? Very few. Well, you'll find this town is full of bright young men seeking an economical solution of the sex problem, to speak politely, and you'll find it a relief not to have them on your doorstep. It's safe here. Come in with me, kid. Give me an audience to talk to. Yes, said Una. It was hard to leave the kindly Herbert grays of the flat, but Una made the break and arranged all her silver toilet articles, which consisted of a plated silver hairbrush, a German silver nail-file, and a good, plain, honest rubber comb, on the bureau in Mrs. Lawrence's room. With the shyness of a girl on her first night in boarding school, Una stuck to Mrs. Lawrence's side in the noisy flow of strange girls down to the dining room. She was used to being self-absorbed in the noisiest restaurants, but she was trembling about the knees as she crossed the room among curious upward glances. She found it very hard to use a fork without clattering it on the plate when she sat with Mrs. Lawrence and four strangers at a table for six. They all were splendidly casual and wise and good-looking. With no men about to intimidate them or to attract them, they made a solid phalanx of bland, satisfied femininity, and Una felt more barred out than in an office. She longed for a man who would be curious about her or cross with her or perform some other easy, customary, simple-hearted, masculine trick. But she was taken into the friendship of the table when Mrs. Lawrence had finished a harangue on the cardinal's sin of serving bean soup four times in two weeks. Oh, shut up, Lawrence, and introduce the new kid, said one girl. You wait till I get through with my introductory remarks, Cassavante. I'm inspired to-night. I'm going to take a plate of bean soup and fit it over Maafaiq's head, upside down. Oh, give Maafaiq a rest. Una was uneasy. She wasn't sure whether this repartee was friendly good spirits or a nagging feud. Like all the ungrateful human race, she considered whether she ought to have identified herself with the noisy Esther Lawrence on entering the home. So might a freshman wonder, or the guest of a club, always the amiable and vulgar Lawrence's are most doubted when they are best intentioned. Una was relieved when she was welcomed by the four. Mamie Magan, the lame Jewess, in whose big brown eyes was an eternal prayer for all of harassed humanity. Jenny Cassavante, in whose eyes was chiefly a prayer that life would keep on being interesting, she, the dark, slender, loquacious, observant child who had requested Mrs. Lawrence to shut up. Rose Larson, like a pretty curly-haired boy, though her shoulders were little and adorable in a white silk waist. Mrs. Amesbury, a nun of business, pale and silent, her thin throat shrouded in white net, her voice low and self-conscious, her very blood seeming white, a woman with an almost morbid air of guarded purity whom you could never associate with the frank crudities of marriage. Her movements were nervous and small, she never smiled, you couldn't be boisterous with her. Yet Mrs. Lawrence whispered she was one of the chief operators of the telephone company, and next to the thoughtful and suffering Mamie Magan, the most capable woman she knew. "'How do you like the tempest and protest, Miss Golden?' the lively Cassavante said airily. "'I don't. Why, the temperance and protection home. Well, I like Mrs. Fike's shoes. I should think they'd be fine to throw at cats.' "'Good work, Golden. You're admitted.' "'Say, Magan,' said Mrs. Lawrence. Golden agrees with me about offices. No chance for women.' "'Mamie Magan sighed, and—' "'Ester,' she said, in a voice which must naturally have been rasping, but which she had apparently learned to control like a violin—' "'Ester, dear, if you could ever understand what offices have done for me. On the east side always it was work and work and watch all the pretty girls in our block get TB in garment factories, or marry fellows that weren't any good and have a baby every year and get so thin and worn out, and the garment worker strikes and picketing on cold nights, and now I am in an office. All the fellows are dandy and polite, not like the floor superintendent where I worked in a department store. He would call down a cash girl for making change slow. I have a chance to do anything a man can do. The boss is just crazy to find women that will take an interest in the work, like it was their own, you know. He told you so himself? "'Sure, I know the line of guff,' said Mrs. Lawrence, and you take an interest and get eighteen plunks per for doing statistics that they couldn't get a real college mail in trousers to do for less than thirty-five.' "'Or put it like this, Lawrence,' said Jenny Cassavante. Magan admits that the world in general is a muddle, and she thinks offices are heaven because by comparison with sweatshops they are halfway decent. The universal discussion was on. Everybody but Oona and the nun of business threw everything from facts to bread pills about the table, and they enjoyed themselves in as unfeminized and brutal a manner as men in a café. Oona had found someone with whom to talk her own shop, and shop is the only reasonable topic of conversation in the world, witness authors being intellectual about editors and romanticism, lovers absorbed in the technique of holding hands, or mothers interested in babies, recipes, and household ailments. After dinner they sprawled all over the room of Oona and Mrs. Lawrence, and talked about theaters, young men, and Mrs. Fike for four solid hours, all but the pretty boyish Rose Larson, who had a young man coming to call at eight. Even the newcomer, Oona, was privileged to take part in giving Rose extensive, highly detailed, and not entirely proper advice—advice of a completeness which would doubtless have astonished the suitor, then dressing somewhere in a furnished room and unconscious of the publicity of his call. Oona also lent Mrs. Larson a pair of silk stockings, helped three other girls to coerce her curly hair, and formed part of the solemn procession that escorted her to the top of the stairs when the still unconscious young man was announced from below. It was Oona who was able to see the young man without herself being seen, and to win notoriety by being able to report that he had smooth black hair, a small moustache, and carried a stick. Oona was living her boarding school days now, at twenty-six. The presence of so many possible friends gave her self-confidence and self-expression. She went to bed happy that night, home among her own people, among the women who, noisy or reticent, slack or aspiring, were joined to make possible a life of work in a world still heavy-scented with the ideals of the harem. CHAPTER XII. That same oasis of a week gave to Oona her first taste of business responsibility, of being in charge and generally comporting herself as do males. But in order to rouse her thus, Chance broke the inoffensive limb of unfortunate Mr. Troy Wilkins as he was stepping from his small bronchial motor car to an icy cement block on seven o'clock of Friday evening. When Oona arrived at the office on Saturday morning, she received a telephone message from Mr. Wilkins directing her to take charge of the office of Bessie Craker and the office boy and the negotiations with the Comfy Coast Building and Development Company regarding the planning of three rows of semi-detached villas. For three weeks the office was as different from the treadmill that it familiarly had been as the home club and Lawrence's controversial room were different from the grays flat. She was glad to work late to arrive not at eight thirty but at a quarter to eight, to gallop down to a cafeteria for coffee and a sandwich at noon, to be patient with callers and to try to develop some knowledge of spelling in that child of nature, Bessie Craker. She walked about the office quickly glancing proudly at its neatness. Daily, with an operator's headgear borrowed from the telephone company over her head, she spent half an hour talking with Mr. Wilkins, taking his dictation, receiving his cautions and suggestions, reassuring him that in his absence the subway ran and Tammany still ruled. After an agitated conference with the vice president of the Comfy Coast Company, during which she was eloquent as an automobile advertisement regarding Mr. Wilkins' former masterpieces, with their every modern improvement, parquet floors, beam ceilings, plate rack, hardwood trim throughout, natty and novel decorations, Una reached the zenith of salesman's virtues. She closed the deal. Mr. Wilkins came back and hemmed and hawed a good deal. He praised the work she hadn't considered well done, and pointed out faults in what she considered particularly clever achievements, and was laudatory but dissatisfying in general. In a few days he, in turn, reached the zenith of virtue on the part of boss. He raised her salary to fifteen dollars a week. She was again merely his secretary, however, and the office trudged through another normal period when all past dramas seemed incredible and all the future drab. But Una was certain now that she could manage business, could weadle Bessie's and face pompous vice presidents, and satisfy quarrelous Mr. Wilkins'. She looked forward. She picked at architecture as portrayed in Mr. Wilkins' big books. She learned the reason and manner of the rows of semi-detached, semi-suburban, semi-comfortable, semi-cheap, and somewhat less than semi-attractive, houses. She was not afraid of the office world now. She had a part in the city and a home. She thought of Walter Babson. Sometimes, when Mrs. Lawrence was petulant, or the office had been unusually exhausting, she fancied that she missed him. But instead of sitting and brooding over folded hands in woman's ancient fashion, she took a man's unfair advantage. She went up to the gymnasium of the home club and worked with the chest-weights and flying rings, a solemn, happy, busy little figure. She laughed more deeply, and she felt the enormous rhythm of the city not as a menacing roar, but as a hymn of triumph. She could never be intimate with Mamie Maggin, as she was with the frankly disillusioned Mrs. Lawrence. She never knew whether Miss Maggin really liked her or not. Her smile, which transfigured her sallow face, was equally bright for Una, for Mrs. Fike, and for beggars. Yet it was Miss Maggin whose faith in the purpose of the struggling world inspired Una. Una walked with her up Madison Avenue, past huge, old, brownstone mansions, and she was unconscious of suiting her own quick-step to Miss Maggin's jerky lameness as the Jews talked of her ideals of a business world which should have generosity and chivalry and the accuracy of a biological laboratory, in which there would be no need of charity to employee or to employ her. Mamie Maggin was the most highly evolved person Una had ever known. Una had, from books and newspapers and Walter Babson, learned that there were such things as socialists and earnest pessimists, and the race sketchily called Bohemians, writers and artists and social workers, who drank claret and made love and talked about the free theater, all on behalf of the brotherhood of man. Una pictured the socialists as always attacking capitalists, the pessimists as always being bitter and egotistic, Bohemians as always being dissipated, but as handsome and noisy and gay. But Mamie Maggin was a socialist who believed that the capitalists, with their profit-sharing in search for improved methods of production, were as sincere in desiring the scientific era as were the most burning socialists, who loved and understood the most oratorical of the young socialists with their hair in their eyes, but also loved and understood the clean little college boys who came into business with a desire to make it not a war but a crusade. She was a socialist who was determined to control and glorify business, a pessimist who was, in her gentle, reticent way, as scornful of half-churches, half-governments, half-educations, as the cynical Mrs. Lawrence. Finally, she who was not handsome or dissipated or gay, but sallow and lame and spartan, knew Bohemia better than most of the professional Hobohemians. As an Eastside child she had grown up in the classes and parties of the university settlement. She had been held upon the then juvenile needs of half the distinguished writers and fighters for reform, who had begun their careers as settlement workers. She, who was still unknown, a clerk and a nobody, and who wasn't always syntactical, was accustomed to people whose names had been made large and sonorous by newspaper publicity. And at the age when ambitious lady artists and derailed Walter Babsons came to New York and determinedly seized on Bohemia, Mamie Magan had outgrown Bohemia and become a worker. To Una she explained the city, made it comprehensible, made art and economics and philosophy human and tangible. Una could not always follow her, but from her she caught the knowledge that the world and all its wisdom is but a booby-blundering schoolboy that needs management and could be managed if men and women would be human beings instead of just businessmen or plumbers or army officers or commuters or educators or authors or club women or traveling salesmen or socialists or republicans or Salvation Army leaders or wearers of clothes. She preached to Una a personal kinghood, an education in brotherhood and responsible nobility, which took in Una's job as much as it did government ownership or reading poetry. Not always was Una breathlessly trying to fly after the lame but broad winged Mamie Magan. She attended high mass at the Spanish church on Washington Heights with Mrs. Lawrence, felt the beauty of the ceremony, admired the simple classic church, adored the Padre, and for about one day planned to scorn Panama Methodism and become a Catholic, after which day she forgot about Methodism and Catholicism. She also accompanied Mrs. Lawrence to a ceremony much less impressive and much less easily forgotten to a meeting with a man. Mrs. Lawrence never talked about her husband, but in this reticence she was not joined by Rose Dawn or Jenny Cassavant. Jenny maintained that the misfitted Mr. Lawrence was alive, very much so, that Esther and he weren't even divorced but merely separated. The only sanction Mrs. Lawrence ever gave to this report was to blurt out one night, keep up your belief in the mysticism of love and all that kind of sentimental sex stuff as long as you can. You'll lose it some day fast enough. Me, I know that a woman needs a man just the same as a man needs a woman, and just as darned unpoetically. Being brought up a Puritan, I never can quite get over the feeling that I oughtn't to have anything to do with men, me as I am, but believe me it isn't any romantic ideal, I sure want them. Mrs. Lawrence continually went to dinners and theaters with men. She told Una all the details, as women do, from the first highly proper handshake down in the pure-minded hall of the Home Club at eight, to the less proper good-night kiss on the dark doorstep of the Home Club at midnight. But she was careful to make clear that one kiss was all she ever allowed, though she grew ditherambic over the charming lonely men with whom she played, a young doctor whose wife was in a madhouse, a clever, restrained, unhappy old broker. Once she broke out, hang it, I want love, and that's all there is to it, that's crudely all there ever is to it with any woman, no matter how much she pretends to be satisfied with mourning the dead, or caring for children, or swatting a job, or being religious or anything else. I'm a lowbrow, I can't give you the economics of it in the spiritual brotherhood and all that stuff like Mamie Maggin, but I know women want a man and love, all of it. Next evening she took Una to dinner at a German restaurant, as chaperone to herself and a quiet, insistent, staring, good-looking man of forty. While Mrs. Lawrence and the man talked about the opera, their eyes seemed to be defying each other. Una felt that she was not wanted. When the man spoke hesitatingly of a cabaret, Una made excuse to go home. Mrs. Lawrence did not return till two. She moved about the room quietly, but Una awoke. I'm glad I went with him, Mrs. Lawrence said, angrily, as though she were defending herself. Una asked no questions, but her good little heart was afraid. Though she retained her joy in Mrs. Lawrence's willingness to take her and her job seriously, Una was dismayed by Mrs. Lawrence's fiercely uneasy interest in men. She resented the insinuation that the sharp, unexpected longing to feel Walter's arms about her might be only a crude physical need for a man, instead of a mystic fidelity to her lost love. Being a lame marcher, a mind which was admittedly shocked at each discovery of the aliveness of theory, Una's observation of the stalking specter of sex did not lead her to make any very lucid conclusions about the matter. But she did wonder a little if this whole business of marriages and marriage ceremonies and legal bonds which any clerkly pastor can guild with religiosity was so sacred as she had been informed in Panama. She wondered a little if Mrs. Lawrence's obvious requirement of man's companionship ought to be turned into a sneaking theft of love. Una Golden was not a philosopher. She was a work-a-day woman. But into her work-a-day mind came a low light from the fire which was kindling the world, the dual belief that life is too sacred to be taken in war-and-filthy industries and dull education, and that most forms and organizations and inherited castes are not sacred at all. The aspirations of Mamie Magan and the alarming frankness of Mrs. Lawrence were not all her life at the home club. With pretty Rose Larson and half a dozen others she played. They went in fluttering, bereaved parties to the theater. They saw visions at symphony concerts and slipped into exhibits of contemporary artists at private galleries on Fifth Avenue. When spring came they had walking parties in Central Park, in Van Cortland Park, on the Palisades, across Staten Island, and picnicked by themselves or with neat, trim-minded, polite men clerks from the various offices and stores where the girls worked. They had a perpetual joy in annoying Mrs. Fike by parties on fire escapes, by lobster-Newberg suppers at midnight. They were discursively excited for a week when Rose Larson was followed from the surface car to the door by an unknown man, and they were unhappily excited when, without explanations, slim, daring Jenny Cassavante was suddenly asked to leave the home club. And they had a rose-lighted dinner when Livy Hedger announced her engagement to a Newark lawyer. Various were the home club women in training and work and ways. They were awkward stenographers and dependable secretaries, fashion artists and department store clerks, telephone girls and clever college bread persons who actually read manuscripts and proof, and wrote captions or household department squibs for women's magazines, real editors, or at least real assistant editors, persons who knew authors and illustrators as did the Great Magan. They were attendants in dentist offices and teachers in night schools and filing girls and manicurists and cashiers and blue linen gown super-wetresses in artistic tea rooms. And clerks, cast, they did have. Yet their comradeship was very sweet, quite real. The factional lines were not drawn according to salary or education or family, but according to gaiety or sobriety or propriety. Una was finding not only her lost boarding school days, but her second youth, perhaps her first real youth. Though the questions inspired by the exceptional Miss Magan and the defiant Mrs. Lawrence kept her restless, her association with the plague girls, her growing acquaintanceship with women who were easy-minded, who had friends and relatives in a place in the city, who did not agonize about their jobs or their loves, who received young men casually and looked forward to marriage and a comfortable flat in Harlem, made Una feel the city as her own proper dwelling. Now she no longer plotted along the streets wonderfully, a detached little stranger. She walked briskly and contentedly, heedless of crowds, returning to her own home in her own city. Most workers of the city remained strangers to it always, but Chance had made Una an insider. It was another chapter in the making of a businesswoman, that spring of happiness and new stirrings in the home club. It was another term in the unplanned, uninstructed, muddling, Chance-governed college which civilization unwittingly keeps for the training of men and women who will carry on the work of the world. It passed swiftly, and July and vacation time came to Una.