 CHAPTER V The Office Manager came casually up to Oona's desk and said, You haven't taken any dictation yet, have you? No, but, with urgent eagerness, I'd like—I'm quite fast in stenography. Well, Mr. Babson in the editorial department wants to give some dictation, and you might try. Oona was so excited that she called herself a silly little fool. She seized her untouched notebook, her pencils sharpened like lances, and tried to appear a very mouse of modesty as she marched down the office to take her first real dictation, to begin her triumphant career, and to have Walter Babson, the beloved fool, speak to her. It was a cold shock to have to stand waiting behind Babson while he rummaged in his roll-top desk and apparently tried to pull out his hair. He looked back at her and blurted, Oh, you, Miss Golden? They said you'd take some dictation. Chase those blueprints off that chair and sit down. Be ready in a sec. While she sat on the edge of the chair, Babson yanked out drawers, plunged his wriggling hands into folders, thrashed through a pile of papers and letters that overflowed a wire basket, and even hauled a dictionary down from the top of the desk and hopefully peered inside the front cover. All the time he kept up comment at which Una smiled doubtfully, not quite sure whether it was meant for her or not. Now, what the doggone doggonishness did I ever do with those doggone notes anyway? I ask you, in the, here they, nope. At last he found, inside a book on motor fuels, the wad of copy paper on which he had scrawled notes with a broad soft pencil, and he began to dictate a short article on air cooling. Una was terrified, lest she be unable to keep up, but she had read recent numbers of the Gazette thoroughly. She had practiced the symbols for motor technologies, and she was not troubled by being watched. Indeed, Babson seemed to have enough to do in keeping his restless spirit from performing the dismaying feet of leaping straight out of his body. He leaned back in his revolving desk chair with a complaining squawk from the spring. He closed his eyes, put his fingers together piously, then seized the chair arms and held them while he cocked one eye open and squinted at a large alarm clock on the desk. He sighed profoundly, bent forward, gazed at his ankle, and reached forward to scratch it. All this time he was dictating, now rapidly, now gurgling and grunting while he paused to find a word. Don't be so nervous! Una wanted to scream at him, and she wanted to add, You didn't ask my permission when he absently fumbled in a cigarette box. She didn't like Walter Babson after all. But he stopped after a rhapsody on the divine merits of an air cooling system, clawed his billowing black hair, and sighed, Sounds improbable, don't it? Must be true, though, it's going to appear in the Gazette, and that's the Motor Dealer's Bible. If you don't believe it, read the blurbs we publish about ourselves. Then he solemnly winked at her and went on dictating. When he had finished, he demanded, Ever take any dictation in this office before? No, sir. Ever take any motor dictation at all? No, sir. Then you'd better read that back to me. Your immediate boss, the office manager, is all right. But the secretary of the company is always pussy-footing around, And if you're ever having any trouble with your stuff when old plush ears is in sight, Keep on typing fast, no matter what you put down. Now, read me the dope. It was approximately correct. He nodded and, Good work, little girl, he said. You'll get along all right. You get my dictation better than that agitated antelope Miss Harmon does right now. That's all. So far as anything connected with Walter Babson could be regular, Una became his regular stenographer, besides keeping up her copying. He was always rushing out, apologizing for troubling her, Sitting on the edge of her desk, dictating a short letter, And advising her to try his latest brand of health food, Which, this spring, was brand biscuits, Probably combined with highballs and too much coffee. The other stenographers winked at him, And he teased them about their coiffures and imaginary sweethearts. For three days the women's coat room boiled with giggles Over Babson's declaration that Miss Macthrossle was engaged to a burglar, And was taking a correspondence course in engraving In order to decorate her poor dear husband's tools with birds and poetic mottos. Babson was less jocular with Una than with the bouncing girls who were natives of Harlem. But he smiled at her as though they were understanding friends, And once he said, but quietly, rather respectfully, You have nice hair, soft! She lay awake to croon that to herself, Though she denied that she was in love with this eccentric waster. Always Babson kept up his ejaculations and fidgeting. He often accused himself of shiflessness And begged her to make sure that he dictated certain matter before he escaped for the evening. Come in and bother the life out of me. Come in every half hour, he would say. When she did come in he would crow and chuckle. Nope, I refuse to be tempted yet. I am a busy man. But maybe I'll give you those verbal jewels of great price on your next visitation. O thou in the vocative. Some Latin scholar, eh? Keep it up, kid. Good work. Maybe you'll keep me from being fired. Usually he gave her the dictation before he went. But not always. And once he disappeared for four days. On a drunk, everybody said, in excited office gossip. During Babson's desertion the managing editor called Una in and demanded, Did Mr. Babson give you some copy about the Manning Wind Shield? No? Will you take a look at his desk for his notes about it? While Una was fumbling for the notes she did not expect to find, She went through all the agony of the little shawl'd foreign wife For the husband who has been arrested. I've got to help you, she said to his desk, To his bag of bull Durham, to his alarm clock, Even to a rather shocking collection of pictures of chorus girls And diaphanously clad dancers, Which was pasted inside the double drawer on the right side of the desk. In her great surge of emotion, She noticed these posturing hussies far less than she did a little volume of Rosetti, Or the overshoes whose worn toes suddenly revealed to her that Walter Babson, The editor, was not rich, was not perhaps so very much better paid than herself. She did not find the notes. She had to go to the managing editor, trembling, All her good little heart wild with pain. The editor's browse made a V at her report, and he grunted, Well, for two days till Walter Babson returned, She never failed to look up when the outer door of the office opened. She found herself immensely interested in trying to discover, From her low plain as copyist, Just what sort of a position Walter Babson occupied Up among the select souls. Nor was it very difficult. The editor's stenographer may not appreciate all the subtleties of his wit, And the refinements of his manner may leave her cold, But she does hear things. She hears the big chief's complaints. Una discovered that the owner and the managing editor Did not regard Walter Babson as a permanent prop of the institution, That they would keep him at his present salary of twenty-five dollars a week, Only till someone happened in who would do the same work for less money. His prose was clever but irregular. He wasn't always to be depended upon for grammar. In everything he was unstable. Yet the owner's secretary reported the owner as saying that some day, If Babson married the right woman, he would settle down and make good. Una did not dare to make private reservations regarding what the right woman ought to mean in this case, But she burned at the thought of Walter Babson's marrying, And for an instant she saw quite clearly the film of soft dark hair that grew just below his sharp cheekbone. But she forgot the sweetness of the vision in scorn of herself for even thinking of marriage with a weakling. Scorn of herself for aspiring to marry a man who regarded her as only a dull stenographer, And a maternal anxiety over him that was untouched by passion. Babson returned to the office, immaculate, a thin, fiery soul. But he was closeted with the secretary of the company for an hour, And when he came out his step was slow. He called for Una and dictated articles in a quiet voice with no jesting. His hand was unsteady. He smoked cigarettes constantly, and his eye was an unwholesome yellow. She said to him suddenly a few days later, Mr. Babson, I'd be glad if I could take care of any papers or anything for you. Thanks, you might stick these chassis sketches away someplace right now. So she was given the chance to keep his desk straight. He turned to her for everything. He said to her abruptly, one dreary late afternoon of April, When she felt immensely languid and unambitious. You're going to succeed, unless you marry some dub. But there's one rule for success. Mind you, I don't follow it myself. I can't. But it's a grand old hunch. If you want to get on, always be ready to occupy the job just ahead of you. Only, what the devil is the job just ahead of a stenog? I've been thinking of you and wondering, what is it? Honestly, Mr. Babson, I don't know here anyway, unless it's Lieutenant of the Girls. Well, oh that's just miffle business, that kind of a job. Well, you'd better learn to express yourself anyway. Sometime you women folks will come into your own with both feet. Whenever you get the chance, take my notes and try to write a better spiel from them than I do. That won't be hard, I guess. I don't know why you're so modest, Mr. Babson. Every girl in the office thinks you write better than any of the other editors. Yeah, but they don't know. They think that just because I chuck them under the chin. I can't do this technical stuff. Oh Lord, what an evening it'll be. I suppose I'll go to a show. Nice, lonely city, what? You come from here? From Pennsylvania. Got any folks? My mother is here with me. That's nice. I'll take her and you to some bum two-bit vaudeville show some night, if you'd like. Got to show my gratitude to you for standing my general slovenliness, Lord. Nice evening. Dine at a rotisserie with a newspaper for companion. Well, good night and good luck. Una surprised her mother when they were vivisecting the weather after dinner by suddenly crying all over the sofa cushions. She knew all of Walter Babson's life from those two or three sentences of his. Francois Vian's America has a plenty. An astonishing number of Americans with the literary itch do contrive to make a living out of that affliction. They write motion picture scenarios and fiction for the magazines that still regard detective stories as the zenith of original art. They gather in woman-centered flats to discuss sex or in hard-voiced groups to play poker. They seem to find in the creation of literature very little besides a way of evading regular office hours. Below this stratum of people so successful that one sometimes sees their names in print is the yearning band of young men who want to write. Just to write, not to write anything in particular, not to express any definite thought, but to be literary, to be bohemian, to dance with slim young authorises of easy morals and be jolly dogs and free souls. Some of them are dramatists with unacted dramas. Some of them do free verse, which is just as free as the productions of regular licensed poets. Some of them do short stories, striking, rather biological, very destructive of conventions. Some of them are ever so handy at all forms. They are perennial candidates for any job as book reviewer, dramatic critic, or manuscript reader. Since they have the naive belief that these occupations require neither toil nor training and enable one to write on the side. Meanwhile, they make their livings as sub-editors on trade journals, as charity workers, or as assistants to illiterate literary agents. To this slum of literature Walter Babson belonged. He felt that he was an author, though none of his poetry had ever been accepted, and though he had never got beyond the first chapter of any of his novels, nor the first act of any of his plays, which concerned authors who roughly resembled Walter Babson. He was distinguished from his fellows by the fact that each year he grew more aware that he hadn't even a dim candle of talent, that he was ill-planned and unpurposed, that he would have to settle down to the ordinary gray limbo of jobs and offices as soon as he could get control of his chaotic desires. Literally he hated himself at times, hated his own egotism, his treacherous appetite for drink and women and sloth, his imitative attempts at literature. But no one knew how bitterly he despised himself in lonely walks in the rain, in savage pacing about his furnished room. To others he seemed vigorously conceited, cock-sure, noisily ready to blame the world for his own failures. Walter Babson was born in Kansas. His father was a farmer and horse doctor, a heavy drinker, an eccentric who joined every radical political movement. In a country school just such a one as Una had taught, then in high school in a nearby town, Walter had won all the prizes for essays and debating, and had learned a good deal about Shakespeare and Caesar and George Washington. Also he had learned a good deal about drinking beer, smoking manfully, and tempting the giggling girls who hung about the depot. He ran away from high school and in the most glorious years of his life worked his way down the Mississippi and up the Rio Grande, up to Alaska and down to Costa Rica, a butt and jester for hobos, sailors, longshoremen, minors, cow punchers, lunchroom owners, and proprietors of small newspapers. He learned to stick type and run a press. He returned to Kansas and worked on a country newspaper, studying poetry and college entrance requirements in the evening. He had at this time the not entirely novel idea that he ought to be able to make a lot of good fiction out of all his experiences. Actually he had no experiences because he had no instinct for beauty. The proof is that he read quite solemnly and reverently a vile little periodical for would-be authors, which reduced authorship to a way of earning one's living by supplying editors with cheap but ingenious items to fill space. It put literature on a level with keeping a five and ten-cent store. But Walter conned its pompous trade journal discussions as to whether the name and address of the author should be typed on the left or the right side of the first page of a manuscript. It's lively little symposia by such successful market gardeners of literature as Mamie Stuyvesant-Blup and Bill Brown and Dr. J. F. Fitzneth on the inspiring subject of whether it paid better to do filler verse for cheap magazines or long verse for the big magazines. At the end this almost madly idealistic journal gave a list of wants of editors. The editor of lingerie and laughter wanted short snappy stuff with a kick in it, especially good yarns about models, grisettes, etc. Wunderlust was in the market for stories with a punch that appealed to every red-blooded American nothing about psychology, problems, Europe, or love wanted. The Plymouth Rock fancier announced that it could use a good lively rural poem every week must be clean and original. Pethos there was in all of this. The infinitely little men and women daring to buy and sell short snappy stuff in this somber and terribly beautiful world of Balzac and Wells and Turgenev. And Pethos there was in that wasted year when Walter Babson sought to climb from the gossiping little prairie town to the grandeur of great capitals by learning to be an efficient manufacturer of good lively rural poems. He neglected even his college entrance books, the Ruskin whose clots of guilt might have trained him to look for real gold, and the stilted Burke who might have given him a vision of empires and races and social destinies. And for his pathetic treachery he wasn't even rewarded. His club-footed verses were always returned with printed rejection slips. When at last he barely slid in to Jonathan Edwards College, Iowa, Walter was already becoming discouraged, already getting the habit of blaming the gods, capitalists, editors, his father, the owner of the country newspaper on which he had been working for everything that went wrong. He yammered destructive theories which would have been as obnoxious to a genuine fighting revolutionist as they were sacrilegious to his hard-fisted, earnest, rustic classmates in Jonathan Edwards. For Walter was not protesting against social injustice. The slavery of rubber gatherers in the Pudamayo and of sweatshop workers in New York did not exist for him. He was protesting because, at the age of twenty, his name was not appearing in large, flattering capitals on the covers of magazines. Yet he was rather amusing. He helped plotting classmates with their assignments, and he was an active participant in all worthy movements to raise hell, as they admirably described it. By the end of his freshman year, he had given up all attempts to be a poet and to extract nourishment from the college classes, which were as hard and unpalatable as dried codfish. He got drunk. He vented his energy in noisy meetings with itinerant Fille de Joie, who were as provincial and rustic, as bewildered and unfortunate as the wild country boys, who in them found their only outlet for youths' madness. Walter was abruptly expelled from college by the one man in the college whom he respected, the saintly president, who had dreams of a new Harvard on the prairies. So Walter Babson found himself at twenty-one an outcast. He declined, though no one would believe him, that all the gentle souls he had ever encountered were weak, all the virile souls vicious or suspicious. He drifted. He doubted himself, and all the more noisily asserted his talent and the injustice of the world. He looked clean and energetic and desirous, but he had nothing on which to focus. He became an active but careless reporter on newspapers in Wichita, Des Moines, Kansas City, St. Louis, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco. Between times he sold real estate and insurance and sets of travel books, for he had no pride of journalism. He wanted to keep going and keep interested and make money and spend it. He wanted to express himself without trying to find out what his self was. It must be understood that, for all his vices, Walter was essentially clean and kindly. He rushed into everything, the bad with the good. He was not rotten with heavy hopelessness, though he was an outcast from his home, he was never a pariah. Not Walter, but the smug devilish cities which took their revenues from saloon keeping were to blame when he turned from the intolerable dullness of their streets to the excitement of alcohol in the saloons and brothels which they made so much more amusing than their churches and parlors. Everywhere in the western newspaper circles Walter heard stories of Californians who had gone east and become geniuses the minute they crossed the Hudson. Walter also went east and crossed the Hudson, but he did not become a genius. If there had been an attic to starve in, he would have starved in one, but as New York has nothing so picturesque, he starved in furnished rooms instead, while he wrote special stories for Sunday newspapers and collected jokes for a syndicated humorous column. He was glad to become managing editor, though he himself was the only editor he had to manage, of a magazine for stamp collectors. He wrote some advertisements for a Broadway dealer in automobile accessories, read half a dozen books on motors, and brazenly demanded his present position on the motor and gas gazette. He was as far from the rarefied air of Bohemia, he really believed that sort of thing, as he had been in Kansas, except that he knew one man who made five thousand dollars a year by writing stories about lumberjacks, minors, cow punchers, and young ladies of quite astounding courage. He was twenty-seven years old when he met Una Golden. He still read Omar Kayam. He had a vague plan of going into real estate. There ought, he felt, to be money in writing real estate advertisements. He kept falling in love with stenographers and waitresses, with actresses whom he never met. He was never satisfied. He didn't at all know what he wanted, but he wanted something stronger than himself. He was desperately lonely, a humorous figure who had dared to aspire beyond the manure piles of his father's farm, therefore a young man to be ridiculed, and in his tragic loneliness he waited for the day when he should find any love, any labor, that should want him enough to seek him and demand that he sacrifice himself. It was Una's first city spring. Save in the squares where the burgeoning trees made green-lighted spaces for noontime lovers, there was no change, no blossomy stirrer in asphalt and cement and brick and steel. Yet everything was changed. Between the cornices twenty stories above the pavement you could see a slit of softer sky, and there was a peculiar radiance in just the light itself, whether it lay along the park turf or made its way down an air well to rest on a stolid wall of yellow brick. The river breeze flowing so persuasively through streets which had been stormed by dusty gales bore happiness. Kind organs made music for ragged dancing children, and old brick buildings smelled warm. Peanut wagons came out with a long shrill wine, locus of the spring. In the office even the most hustling of the great ones became human. They talked of suburban gardens and of motoring out to country clubs for tennis. They smiled more readily and shamelessly said, I certainly got the spring fever for fair today. And twice did S. Herbert Ross go off to play golf all afternoon. The stenographer who commuted, always there is one girl in the office who commutes, brought spring in the form of pussy willows and apple blossoms and was noisily envied. The windows were open now, and usually someone was speculatively looking down to the life on the pavement eight stories below. At noon hour the younger girls of the office strolled along the sidewalk in threes and fours, bare headed, their arms about one another, their springtime lane an irregular course between boxes in front of loft buildings, or they ate their box and paper napkin lunches on the fire escape that wound down into the court. They gigglingly drew their skirts about their ankles and flirted with young porters and packers who leaned from windows across the court. Una sat with them and wished that she could flirt like the daughters of New York. She listened eagerly to their talk of gathering violets in Van Cortland Park and tramping on the palisades. She noted an increased number of excited confidences to the effect that he says to me and I says to him and say, Gee, honestess, he's a swell fellow. She caught herself wanting to tramp the palisades with the Walter Babson who didn't even know her first name. When she left the flat these mornings she forgot her lonely mother instantly in the treacherous magic of the tender sky and wanted to run away to steal the blue and silver day for her own. But it was gone when she reached the office. No silver and blue day was here, but on golden oak desk and oak and frosted glass semi-partitions the same light is in the winter. Sometimes if she got out early a stilly afterglow of amber and turquoise brought back the spring, but all day long she merely saw signs that other wear for other people spring did exist and she wistfully trusted in it as she watched and helped Walter Babson. She was conscious that she was working more intimately with him as a comrade now, not as clerk with executive. There had been no one illuminating moment of understanding. He was impersonal with her, but each day their relationship was less of a mechanical routine, more of a personal friendship. She felt that he really depended on her steady carefulness. She knew that through the wild tangle of his impulsiveness she saw a desire to be noble. He came clattering down the aisle of desk to her one may afternoon and begged, Say, Miss Golden, I'm stuck. I got to get out some publicity on the Governor's Good Roads article we're going to publish. Want to send it out to forty papers in advance, and I can't get only a dozen proofs, and it's got to go off tonight. Can you make me some copies? You can use onion skin paper and carbonum and make anyway five copies at a whack, but probably you'll have to stay late. Got anything on tonight? Could you do it? Could you do it? Could you? Surely. Well, here's the stuff. Just single-space that introductory spiel at the top, will you? Una rudely turned out of her typewriter a form letter which she was writing for S. Herbert Ross, and began to type Walter's publicity. Her shoulders bent, her eyes intent, oblivious to the steady stream of gossip which flowed from stenographer to stenographer, no matter how busy they were. He needed her. She would have stayed till midnight, while the keys burred under her fingers she was unconsciously telling herself a story of how she would be working half the night, with the office still and shadowy, of how a dead white face would peer through the window near her desk, difficult of accomplishment as the window was eight stories up in air, of how she was to be pursued by a man on the way home, and how, when she got there, her mother would say, I just don't see how you couldn't neglect me like this all evening. All the while she felt herself in touch with large affairs, an article by the Governor of the State, these very sheets that she was typing to go to famous newspapers, to the thundering presses of which she had read in fiction, urgency, affairs, and doing something for Walter Babson. She was still typing swiftly at 5.30 the closing hour. The article was long. She had at least two hours of work ahead. Miss Moynihan came stockily to say good night. The other stenographers fluttered out to the elevators. Their corner became oppressively quiet. The office manager, gently puttered about, bade her good night, drifted away. S. Herbert Ross boomed out of his office, explaining the theory of advertising to a gasolini man in a pin-check suit as they waddled to the elevator. The telephone girl hurried back to connect up a last call, frowned while she waited, yanked out the plug, and scuttled away, a creamy, row-eyed girl, pretty and unhappy at her harassing job of connecting nervous talkers all day. Four men, editors and advertising men, shouldered out, bawling over a rather feeble joke about Bill's desire for a drink and their willingness to help him slay the booze evil. Luna was conscious that they had gone, that walls of silence were closing about her clacking typewriter, and that Walter Babson had not gone, that he was sharing with her this whispering, forsaken office. Presently he came rambling out of the editorial room. He had taken off his grotesque, great, horn-rimmed glasses. His eyes were mutinous in his dark melancholy face. He drew a hand over them and shook his head. Luna was aware of all this in one glance. Poor tired boy, she thought. He sat on the top of the nearest desk, hugged his knee, rocked back and forth and said, much left, Miss Golden? I think I'll be through in about two hours. Oh, Lord, I can't let you stay that late. It doesn't matter, really. I'll be glad. I haven't had to stay late much. For quite the first time he stared straight at her, saw her as a human being. She was desperately hoping that her hair was smooth and that there wasn't any blue from the typewriter ribbon dobbed on her cheeks. He ceased his rocking, appraised her. A part of her brain was wondering what he would do. A part longing to smile temptingly at him. A part coldly commanding, you will not be a little fool. He isn't interested in you and you won't try to make him be either. Why, you look as fagged as I feel, he said. I suppose I'm as bad as the rest. I kick like a steer when the old man shoves some extra work on me and then I pass the buck and make you stay late. Say, tell you what we'll do. Very sweet to her was his we and his intimacy of tone. I'll start copying, too. I'm quite considerable at machine-pounding myself and we can get the thing done and mailed by six-thirty or so and then I'll buy you a handsome dinner at Childs's. Gosh, I'll even blow you to a piece of pie and I'll shoot you up home by quarter to eight. Great stuff! Give me a copy of the drool. Meanwhile you'll have a whole hour for worried maiden thoughts over going out to eat with the bad, crazy Wally Babson. His smile was a caress. Her breath caught. She smiled back at him fearfully. Then he was gone. In the editorial office was heard the banging of his heavy old typewriter. It was an office joke, Walter's hammering of the threshing machine. She began to type again with mechanical rapidity, not consciously seeing the copy, so distraught was she as she murmured, Oh, I oughtn't to go out with him. But I will. What nonsense! Why shouldn't I have dinner with him? Oh, I mustn't. I'm a typist and he's a boss. But I will. Glancing down the quiet stretches of the office to the windows looking to westward, she saw that the sky was a delicate primrose. In a loft building rearing out of the low structures between her and the North River, lights were springing out, and she, who ought to have known that they marked weary, late-staying people like herself, fancied that they were the lights of restaurants for gay lovers. She dismissed her problem, forgot the mother who was waiting with the demand for all of Una's youth, and settled down to a happy excitement in the prospect of going out with Walter, of knowing him, of feeling again that smile. He came prancing out with his copies of the article before she had finished. Some copyist, eh? he cried. Say, hustle and finish! Gee, I've been smoking cigarettes today till my mouth tastes like a fish market. Want to eat and forget my troubles. With her excitement dulled to a matter of fact-hungryness, she trotted beside him to a restaurant, one of the string of vance eating places, a food mill which tried to achieve originality by the use of imitation rafters, a plate rack aligned with landscape plates, and varnished black tables for four, instead of the long marble tables which crowded the patrons together in most places of the sort. Walter verbosely called her attention to the mottos painted on the wood, the individual table lights and pink shades. Just forget the eats, Miss Golden, imagine you're in a regular restaurant. Gosh, this place ought to reconcile you to dining with the crazy babson. I can't imagine a liaison in a place where coffee costs five cents. He sounded boisterous, but he took her coat so languidly he slid so loosely into his chair that she burned with desire to sue the way his office weariness. I forgot all reserve. She burst out. Why do you call yourself crazy? Just because you have more energy than anybody else in the office? No, he said grimly, snatching at the menu, because I haven't any purpose in the scheme of things. Una told herself that she was pleased to see how the scrawny waitress purred at Walter when he gave his order. She was feeling resentfully that no saw-voiced, glumping Amazon of a waitress could appreciate Walter's smile. In a vance eating place, ordering a dinner and getting approximately what you order is not a delicate, epicurian art, but a matter of business and not till an enormous platter of Vance's special ham and eggs country style was slammed down between them, and ketchup, rocestershire sauce, napkins, more rolls, water, and another fork, severally demanded of the darting waitress, did Walter seem to remember that this was a romantic dinner with a strange girl, not a deal in food supplies? His wavering black eyes searched her face. She was agitatedly aware that her skin was broken out in a small red spot beside her lips, but she hoped that he would find her forehead clear, her mouth a flower. He suddenly nodded, as though he had grown used to her and found her comfortable. While his wreathing hands picked fantastically at a roll and made crosses with lumps of sugar, his questions probed at that hidden soul which she herself had never found. It was the first time that anyone had demanded her formula of life, and in her struggle to express herself she rose into a frankness which Panama circles of courtship did not regard as proper to young women. What's your ambition, he blurted, going to just plug along and not get anywhere? No, I'm not, but it's hard. Women aren't trusted in business, and you can't count without responsibility. All I can do is keep looking. Go out for suffrage, feminism, so on? I don't know anything about them. Most women don't know anything about them, about anything. Huh, most people don't. Wouldn't have office grinding if people did know anything. How much training have you had? Oh, public school, high school, commercial college. Where? Panama, Pennsylvania. I know, about like my own school in Kansas. The high school principal would have been an undertaker if he'd had more capital. Gee, principal and capital might make a real cunning pun out of that if I worked over it a little. I know. Go to church? Why, why yes, of course. Which god do you favor at present? Unitarian or Catholic or Christian Science or a Seventh Day Advent? Why, it's the same. Now, don't spring that it's the same god stuff on me. It isn't the same god that simply hones for candles and music in an Episcopal church and gives the Plymouth Brotherhood a private copyright revelation that organs and candles are wicked. You're terribly sacrilegious. You don't believe any such thing. Or else you'd lamb me, same as they used to do in the Crusades. You don't really care a hang. No, I really don't care. She was amazed to hear herself admit. Of course I'm terribly crude and vulgar, but then what else can you be in dealing with a bunch of churches that haven't half the size or beauty of farmers' red barns, and yet the dubs go on asserting that they believe the church is God's house. If I were God, I'd sure object to being worse house than the cattle. But gosh, let's pass that up. If I started in on what I think of almost anything, churches or schools or this lying advertising game, I'd yelp all night, and you could always answer me that I'm merely a neurotic failure while the big guns that I jump on own motor cars. He stopped his rapid tirade, chucked a lump of sugar at an interrogative cat which was making the round of the tables, scowled, and suddenly fired at her. What do you think of me? You're the kindest person I ever met. Huh? Kind? Good to my mother? Perhaps. You've made the office happy for me. I really admire you. I suppose I'm terribly un-lady-like to tell you. Yes, he marveled. God an admirer! And I always thought you were an uncommonly level-headed girl. Shows how you can fool him. He smiled at her directly, rather forlornly, proud of her praise. Regardless of other tables, he thrust his arm across and with the side of his hand touched the side of hers for a second. Dejectedly, he said, But why do you like me? I've good intentions. I'm willing to pinch Tolstoy's laurels right off his grave and orate like William Jennings Bryan. And there's a million yearners like me. There ain't a hall-bedroom boy in New York that wouldn't like to be a genius. I like you because you have fire. Mr. Babson, do you? Walter. How premature you are. Walter. You'll be calling me Una next and think how shocked the girls will be. Oh, no. I've quite decided to call you Goldie. Sounds nice and sentimental. But for heaven's sake, go on telling me why you like me. That isn't a hackneyed subject. Oh, I've never known anybody with fire, except maybe S. Herbert Ross. And he, he, he blobs around. Yes, something like that. I don't know whether you are ever going to do anything with your fire, but you do have it, Mr. Babson. I'll probably get fired with it. Say, do you read Omar? In nothing do the inarticulate million hall-room boys who want to be geniuses. The ordinary, unshaved, not over bathed, ungrammatical young men of any American city so nearly transcend provincialism as in an enthusiasm over their favorite minor cynic. Albert Hubbard, or John Kendrick Bangs, or in Walter Babson's case, Mr. Fitzgerald's variations on Omar. Una had read Omar as a pretty poem about roses and murmurous courts, but read him she had. And such was Walter's delight in that fact that he immediately endowed her with his own ability to enjoy cynicism. He jabbed at the menu with a fork and glowed and shouted, Say, isn't it great that quaterrain about take the cash and let the credit go? While Una beamed and enjoyed her boy's youthful enthusiasm, mother of the race, ancient tribal woman, medieval chattelain she was just now, kin to all the women who in any age have clapped their hands to their men's boasting, she agreed with him that all these guys that pride themselves on being gentlemen like in English novels are just the same as the dubs you see in ordinary life, and that it was not too severe an indictment to refer to the advertising manager as S. Herbert Louse, and that the woman feeding by herself over at that corner table looks mysterious somehow, gee, there must be a tragedy in her life. But her gratification in being admitted to his enthousiasms was only a background for her flair when he boldly caught up her white paw and muttered, tired little hand that has to work so hard. She couldn't move, she was afraid to look at him, clattering restaurant and smell of roast pork and people about her all dissolved in her agitation. She shook her head violently to awaken herself, heard herself say calmly, she was terribly late, don't you think it is? and knew that she was arising. But she moved beside him down the street in Langer, wondering in every cell of her etherealized body whether he would touch her hand again, what he would do. Not till they neared the subway station did she, woman, the protector, noting his slow step rouse herself to say, oh, don't come up in the subway I'm used to it really. My dear Goldie, you aren't used to anything in real life. Gee, I said that snapily and it don't mean a thing. He gleefully pointed out. He seized her arm which prickled to the touch of his fingers, rushed her down the subway steps, and while he bought their tickets they smiled at each other. Several times on the way up he told her that it was a pleasure to have someone who could appreciate his honest-to-god opinions of the managing editor and S. Herbert Frost. The subway, plunging through unvaried darkness, levitated them from the district of dark loft buildings and theater-bound taxicabs to a far out Broadway, softened with trees and brightened with small apartment houses and little shops. They could see a great feathery space of vernal darkness down over the Hudson at the end of a street. Steel-bound nature seemed reaching for them wherever in a vacant lot she could get free and send out quickening odors of fresh garden soil. Almost country, said Walter. An urgent, daring look came into his eyes under the light-cluster. He stopped, took her arm. There was an edge of spring madness in his voice as he demanded. Wouldn't you like to run away with me tonight? Feel this breeze on your lips. It's simply plum-full of mystery. Wouldn't you like to run away? And we'd tramp the palisades till dawn and go to sleep with the may sun glaring down the Hudson. Wouldn't you like to? Wouldn't you? She was conscious that, though his head was passionately thrown back, his fawn-like eyes stared into hers and that his thin lips arched. Terribly, she wanted to say, yes. Actually, Una Golden of Panama and the Gazette Office speculated, for a tenth of a second, whether she couldn't go. Madness. River flow and darkness and the stars. But she said, no, I'm afraid we couldn't possibly. No, he said, slowly. Of course. Of course, I didn't mean we could. But Goldie, little Goldie that wants to live and rule things, wouldn't you like to go? Wouldn't you? Yes. You hurt my arm so. Oh, don't. We must— Her low cry was an appeal to him to save them from Spring's scornful lusty demand. Every throbbing nerve in her seemed to appeal to him and it was not relief but gratitude that she felt when he said tenderly, poor kid, which way? Come. They walked soberly toward the golden flat and soberly he mused. Poor kids, both of us, trying to be good slaves in an office when we want to smash things. You'll be a queen. You'll grab the throne, same as you grab papers off in my desk. And maybe you'll let me be court jester. Why do you say I'll be a queen? Do you mean, literally, in business and executive? Hadn't thought just what it would imply, but I suppose it's that. But why? Why? I'm simply one of a million stenographers. Oh, well, you aren't satisfied to take things just as they're handed to you. Most people are, and they stick in a rut and wonder who put them there. All this success business is a mystery. Listen to how successful men trip themselves and try to explain to a bunch of nice, clean, young clerks how they stole their success. But I know you'll get it because you aren't satisfied easily. You take my work and do it, and yet you're willing to work in one corner till it's time to jump. That's my failing. I ain't willing to stick. I—perhaps. Here's the flat. Lord! he cried. Walk farther and back. Well, they were stealing onward toward the breeze from the river before she had finished her. Well, think of wasting this hypnotizing evening talking of success word that means a big house in yonkers. When we've become friends, Goldie, little Goldie, business of souls grabbing for each other, friends, at least tonight, haven't we, dear, haven't we? Oh, I hope so, she whispered. He drew her hand into his pocket and clasped it there. She looked shyly down. Strange that her hand should not be visible when she could feel its palm flame against his. She let it snuggle there, secure. Mr. Walter Babson was not a young man with bad prospects or good prospects. He was love incarnate in magic warm flesh, and his hand was the hand of love. She was conscious of his hard-starched cuff pressing against her bare arm, a man's cuff under the rough surface of his man's coat sleeve. He brought her back to the vestibule of the flat. For a moment he held both arms at the elbow and looked at her. While with a panic fear she wondered why she could not move, wondered if he were going to kiss her. He withdrew his hands, sighed, Good night, Goldie, I won't be lonely tonight, and turned abruptly away. Through all of Mrs. Golden's long sobbing queries as to why Una had left her alone all evening, Una was patient. For she knew that she had ahead of her a quiet moment when she would stand alone with the God of love and pray to him to keep her boy, her mad boy, Walter. While she heard her voice crisply explaining, Why, you see, mother dear, I simply had to get some work done for the office, Una was telling me some day he will kiss me, and I'm not sorry he didn't tonight, not now any more I'm not. It's so strange, I like to have him touch me, and I simply never could stand other men touching me. I wonder if he's excited now too. I wonder what he's doing. Oh, I'm glad, glad I loved his hands. End of Chapter 5 Part 2 Part 1 Chapter 6 of The Job I never thought a nice girl could be in love with a man who is bad, and I suppose Walter is bad, kind of, but maybe he'll become good. So Una simple-heartedly reflected on her way to the subway next morning. She could not picture what he would do, now that it was hard, dry day again, and all the world panted through dusty streets. And she recklessly didn't care, for Walter was not hard and dry and dusty, and she was going to see him again. Sometimes she was timorous about seeing him because he had read the longing in her face, had known her soul with its garments thrown away. But timorous or not she had to see him. She would never let him go, now that he had made her care for him. Walter was not in sight when she entered the offices, and she was instantly swept into the routine. Not clasping hands beguiled her, but lists to copy, typing errors to erase, and the irritating adjustment of a shift key which fiendishly kept falling. For two hours she did not see him. About ten-thirty she was aware that he was prosaically strolling toward her. Hundreds of times, in secret maiden speculations about love, the girl, Una, had surmised that it would be embarrassing to demand the morning after you had yielded to his caress. It had been perplexing one of those mysteries of love over which virgins brood between chapters of novels, of which they diffidently whisper to other girls when young married friends are amazingly going to have a baby. But she found it natural to smile up at Walter. In this varnished daytime office neither of them admitted their madness of meeting hands. He merely stooped over her desk and said sketchily, morning little Goldie. Then for hours he seemed to avoid her. She was afraid, most of all afraid of her own desire to go to him and wail that he was avoiding her. At three o'clock when the office tribe gave naive gratitude any excuse to talk, to stop and tell one another a new joke, to rush to the window and critically view a parade, Una saw that Walter was beginning to hover near her. She was angry that he did not come straight to her. He did not seem quite to know whether he wanted her or not. But her face was calm above her typing, while here at her over the shoulder of S. Herbert Ross to whom he was talking. He drew nearer to her. He examined a poster. She was oblivious of him. She was conscious that he was trying to find an excuse to say something without openly admitting to the ever-spying row of stenographers that he was interested in her. He wumbled up to her at last and asked what letter she had filed for him. She knew from the casual looking drop of his eyes that he was peering at the triangle of her clear-skinned throat and for his peeping uneasiness she rather despised him. She could fancy herself shouting at him, oh, stop fidgeting! Make up your mind whether you like me or not and hurry up about it. I don't care now. In which secret defiance she was able to luxuriate since he was still in the office, not gone from her forever, till five o'clock when the detached young men of offices are want to face another evening of lonely irrelevancy and desperately begin to reach for companionship. At that hour Walter rushed up and begged, Goldie, you must come out with me this evening. I'm sorry, but it's so late. Oh, I know, gee, if you knew how I've been thinking about you all day. I've been wondering if I ought to, I'm no good, blooming waster, I told myself, and I wondered if I had any right to try to make you care, but oh, you must come, Goldie. Una's pride steeled her. A woman can forgive any vice of man more readily than she can forgive his not loving her so unhesitatingly that he will demand her without stopping to think of his vices. Refusal to sacrifice the beloved is not a virtue in youth. Una said, clearly, I am sorry, but I can't possibly this evening. Well, wish you could, he sighed. As he moved away, Una reveled in having refused his half-hearted invitation, but already she was aware that she would regret it. She was shaken with woman's fiercely possessive clinging to love. The light on one side of her desk was shut off by the bulky presence of Miss Moynihan. She whispered huskily, say, Miss Golden, come out for that Babson fellow. He acts like he was stuck on you. Say, listen, everybody says he's a bad one. Say, listen, honest, they say he'd compromise a lady just soon as not. Why, I don't know what you mean. Oh, no, like fun, you don't. Him rubbering at you all day and pussy-footing around. Why, you're perfectly crazy. He was merely asking me if I could go to his office. Oh, yes, sure. Let me tell you, a lady can't be none too careful about her reputation with one of them skinny dark devils like a Dago snooping around. Why, you're absolutely ridiculous. Besides, how do you know Mr. Babson is bad? Has he ever hurt anybody in the office? No, but they say he peaved after you and me been such good friends, Miss Golden. I don't know that this Babson fellow ever done anything worse than eat crackerjack at South Beach. But I was just telling you what they all say. How he drinks and goes with a lot of toddies and all. But he's all right if you say so. And honest to God, Miss Golden, listen, honest, I wouldn't knock him for nothing if you don't follow. And in admiration. And him an editor. Gee. Una tried to see herself as a princess forgiving her honest servitor. But, as a matter of fact, she was plain angry that her romance should be dragged into the nastiness of office gossip. She resented being a stenographer, one who couldn't withdraw from her place for dreams. And she fireily defended Walter in her mind, throbbed with a big sweet pity for her nervous aspiring boy, whose quest for splendor made him seem wild to the fools about them. When, just at 5.30, Walter charged up to her again, she met him with a smile of unrestrained intimacy. If you're going to be home at all this evening, let me come up just for fifteen minutes, he demanded. Yes, she said breathlessly. Oh, I oughtn't to, but come up at nine. Una had always mechanically liked children, had ejaculated Oh, the pink little darling over each neighborhood infant, had pictured children of her own, and never till that night had the desire to feel her own baby's head against her breast been a passion. After dinner, she sat on the stoop of her apartment house, watching the children at play between motors on the street. Oh, it would be wonderful to have a baby, a boy like Walter must have been, to nurse and pet and cry over, she declared of faint brown ringlets, hair that would be black like Walters. Later, she chided herself for being so bold, so unpanamanian, but she was proud to know that she could long for the pressure of a baby's lips. The brick-walled street echoed with jagged cries of children. Tired women in must wastes poked their red steamy necks out of windows. The sky was a blur of gray, and, lest she forget the job, Una's left wrist ached from typing. Yet she heard the rustle of spring, and her spirit swelled with thankfulness as she felt her life to be not a haphazard series of days, but a divine progress. Walter was coming to-night. She was anxious of her mother upstairs. From her place of meditation she had to crawl up the many steps to the flat and answer at least twenty questions as to what she had been doing. Of Walter's coming she could say nothing. She could not admit her interest in a man she did not know. At a quarter to nine I feel sort of head-a-key. I think I'll run down and sit on the steps again and get a little fresh air. Let's have a little walk. I'd like some fresh air, too," said Mrs. Golden, brightly. Why, oh, to tell the truth, I wanted to think over some office business. Oh, of course, my dear, if I am in the way Mrs. Golden sighed pitifully off into the bedroom. Una followed her and wanted to comfort her, but she could say nothing because she was palpitating over Walter's coming. The fifteen minutes of his stay might hold any splendor. She could not change her clothes. Her mother was in the bedroom, sobbing. All the way down the four flights of stairs she wanted to flee back to her mother. It was with a cold impatience that she finally saw Walter approach the house ten minutes late. He was so grotesque in his frantic, puffing hurry. He was no longer the brilliant Mr. Babson, but a moist young man who hemmed and sputtered. Gee, couldn't find clean collar, hustled my head off, just missed Subway Express, couldn't make it. Phew, I'm hot! It doesn't matter, she condescended. He dropped on the step just below her and mopped his forehead. Neither of them could say anything. He took off his horn-rimmed eyeglasses, carefully inserted the point of a pencil through the loop, swung them in a buzzing circle, and started to put them on again. Oh, keep them off, she snapped. You look so high-brow with them. Yeah, why, sure. She felt very superior. He feverishly ran a finger along the upper rim of his left ear, sprang up, stooped to take her hand, glared into her eyes till she shrank, and then, a nail cleaner, cleaner, a common, ten-cent file, fell out of his inner pocket and clinked on the stone step. "'Oh, damn!' he groaned. "'I really think it is going to rain,' she said. They both laughed. He plumped down beside her, uncomfortably wedged between her and the rail. He caught her hand, intertwined their fingers so savagely that her knuckles hurt. "'Look here,' he commanded. "'You don't really think it's going to rain any such a darn thing. I've come fourteen billion hot miles up here for just fifteen minutes. Yes, and you wanted to see me yourself, too. And now you want to talk about the history of recent rains.' In the bitter sweet spell of his clasp, she was oblivious of street, children, sky. She tried to withdraw her hand, but he squeezed her fingers the more closely, and their two hands dropped on her thin knee, which tingled to the impact. "'But—but what did you want to see me about?' Her superiority was burnt away. He answered her hesitation with a trembling demand. "'I can't talk to you here. Can't we go someplace? Come walk toward the river.' "'Oh, I dare not really, Walter. My mother feels so—so fidgety tonight, and I must go back to her, by and by. "'But would you like to go with me?' "'Yes.' "'Then that's all that matters.' "'Perhaps—perhaps we could go up on the roof here for just a few minutes. Then I must send you home.' "'Hooray! Come on!' He boldly lifted her to her feet, followed her up the stairs. On the last dark flight near the roof he threw both arms about her and kissed her. She was amazed that she did not want to kiss him back, that his abandon did not stir her. Even while she was shocked and afraid, he kissed again, and she gave way to his kiss. Her cold mouth grew desirous. She broke away with shocked pride, shocked most of all at herself, that she let him kiss her thus. "'You quiver so to my kiss,' he whispered in awe. "'I don't,' she denied, "'it just doesn't mean anything. It does, and you know it does. I had to kiss you. Oh, sweetheart, sweetheart, we are both so lonely. Kiss me.' "'No, no,' she held him away from her. "'Yes, I tell you.' She encircled his neck with her arm, laid her cheek beside his chin, rejoiced boundlessly in the man-roughness of his chin, of his coat-sleeve. The man sent of him, sent of tobacco and soap and hair. She opened her lips to his. Slowly she drew her arm from about his neck, his arm from about her waist. "'Walter,' she mourned, "'I did want you. But you must be good to me. Not kiss me like that. Not now, anyway, when I'm lonely for you and can't resist you. Oh, it wasn't wrong, was it, when we needed each other so? It wasn't wrong, was it? Oh, no, no. But not—not again, not for a long while. I want you to respect me. Maybe it wasn't wrong, dear, but it was terribly dangerous. Come, let's stand out in the cool air on the roof for a while, and then you must go home.' They came out on the flat, graveled roof, round which all the glory of the city was blazing, and hand in hand, in a confidence delicately happy now, stood worshiping the spring. "'Dear,' he said, "'I feel as though I were a robber who had gone crashing right through the hedge around your soul, and then, after that, come out in a garden, the sweetest, coolest garden. I will try to be good to you, and for you.' He kissed her fingertips. Yes, you did break through. At first it was just a kiss, and the—oh, it was the kiss, and there wasn't anything else. Oh, do let me live in the little garden still. Trust me, dear. I will trust you. Come, I must go down now. Can I come to see you? Yes. Goldie, listen, he said, as they came downstairs to her hallway. Any time you'd like to marry me, I don't advise it. I guess I'd have good intentions, but be a darn poor hand at putting up shelves. But any time you'd like to marry me, or any of those nice conventional things, just let me know, will you? Not that it matters much. What matters is I want to kiss you good night. No, what matters is I'm not going to let you. Not tonight. Good night, dear. She scampered down the hall. She tiptoed into the living room, and for an hour she brooded, felt faint and ashamed at her bold response to his kiss, yet wanted to feel his sharp-ridged lips again. Sometimes, in a bitter frankness, she told herself that Walter had never even thought of marriage till their kiss had fired him. She swore to herself that she would not give all her heart to love, that she would hold him off and make him value her precious little store of purity and tenderness. But passion and worry together were lost in a prayer for him. She knelt by the window till her own individuality was merged with that of the city's million lovers. Like sickness and war, the office grind absorbs all personal desires. Love and ambition and wisdom, it turns to its own purposes. Every day, Una and Walter saw each other. Their hands touched as he gave her papers to file. There was affection in his voice when he dictated, and once, outside the office door, he kissed her. Yet their love was kept suspended. They could not tease each other and flirt rockously, like the telephone girl and the elevator starter. Every day he begged her to go to dinner with him, to let him call at the flat, and after a week she permitted him to come. At dinner, when Una told her mother that a young gentleman at the office—in fact, Mr. Babson, the editor whose dictation she took—was going to call that evening, Mrs. Golden looked pleased and said, Isn't that nice? Why, you never told Mother he was interested in you? Well, of course, we kind of work together. I do hope he's a nice, respectful young man, not one of these city people that flirt and drink cocktails and heaven knows what all. Why, uh, I'm sure you'll like him. Everybody says he's the cleverest fellow in the shop. Office, dear, not shop. Is he—does he get a big salary? Why, mums, I'm sure I haven't the slightest idea. How should I know? Well, I just asked, will you put on your pink and white crepe? Don't you think the brown silk would be better? Why, Una, I want you to look your prettiest. You must make all the impression you can. Well, perhaps I'd better, Una said demurely. Despite her provincial training, Mrs. Golden had a much better instinct for dress than her sturdy daughter, so long as she was not left at home alone, her mild selfishness did not make her want to interfere with Una's interests. She awed and owed over the torn border of Una's crepe dress, and mended it with quick, pussy-like movements of her fingers. She tried to arrange Una's hair so that its pale golden texture would shine in broad, loose undulations, and she was as excited as Una when they heard Walter's bouncing steps in the hall, his nervous tap at the door, his fumbling for a push-button. Una dashed wildly to the bedroom for a last nose-powdering, a last glance at her hair and nails, and slowly paraded to the door to let him in, while Mrs. Golden stood primely with folded hands like a cabinet photograph of 1885. So the irregular Walter came into a decidedly regular atmosphere and had to act like a pure-minded young editor. They conversed, Lord, how they conversed. Mrs. Golden respectively desired to know Mr. Babson's opinions on the weather, New Yorkers, her little girl Una's work, fashionable city ministers, the practical value of motor cars, and the dietetic value of beans, the large white beans, not the small brown ones. She had grown both varieties in her garden at home. Panama, Pennsylvania, when Mr. Golden, Captain Golden, he was usually called, was alive, and had Mr. Babson ever had a garden or seen Panama, and was Una really attending to her duties? All the while Mrs. Golden's canary trilled approval of the conversation. Una listened, numbed, while Walter kept doing absurd things with his face, pinched his lips and tapped his teeth and rubbed his jaws though he needed a shave. He took off his eyeglasses to wipe them and tied his thin legs in a knot, and all the while said, yes, there's certainly a great deal to that. At a quarter to ten Mrs. Golden rose, indulged in a little kitten yawn behind her silvery hand, and said, well, I think I must be off to bed. I find these May days so languid. Don't you, Mr. Babson? Spring fever! I just can't seem to get enough sleep. Now you mustn't stay up too late, Una dear. The bedroom door had not closed before Walter had darted from his chair, picked Una up, his hands pressing tight about her knees and shoulders, kissed her, and set her down beside him on the couch. Wasn't I good, huh? Wasn't I good, huh? Wasn't I? Now who says Wally Babson ain't a good parlor pup, huh? Oh, you old darling, you were twice as agonized as me. And that was all he said in words. Between them was a secret, a greater feeling of unfettered intimacy, because together they had been polite to mother, tragic, pitiful mother, who had been enjoying herself so much without knowing that she was in the way. That intimacy needed no words to express it. Hands and cheeks and lips spoke more truly. They were children of emotion, young and crude and ignorant, groping for life and love all the world knew to them, despite their sorrows and waiting. They were clerklings, not lords, of love and life, but all the more easily did they yield to longing for happiness. Between them was the battle of desire and timidity, and not all the desire was his, not hers all the timidity. She fancied sometimes that he was as much afraid as was she of debasing their shy seeking into unveiled passion. Yet his was the initiative. Always she panted and wondered what he would do next, feared and wondered and rebuked and desired. He abruptly drew her head to his shoulder, smoothed her hair. She felt his fingers again communicate to her every nerve a tingling electric force. She felt his lips quest along her cheek and discover the soft little spot just behind her ear. She followed the restless course of his hands across her shoulders, down her arm, lingeringly over her hand. His hands seemed to her to have an existence quite apart from him, to have a mysterious existence of its own. In silence they rested there. She kept wondering if his shoulder had not been made just for her cheek. With little shivers she realized that this was his shoulder, Walters, a man's, as the rough cloth prickled her skin. Silent they were, and for a time secure, but she kept speculating as to what he would dare to do next, and she fancied that he was speculating about precisely the same thing. He drew a catching breath, and suddenly her lips were opening to his. Oh, you mustn't! You promised, she moaned, when she was able to draw back her head. Again he kissed her, quickly, then released her, and began to talk rapidly of nothing. Apropos of offices and theaters in the tides of spring, he was really telling her that powerful though his restless curiosity was, greatly though their poor little city bodies craved each other, yet he did respect her. She scarce listened, for at first she was bemused by two thoughts. She was inquiring sorrowfully whether it was only her body that stirred him, whether he found any spark in her honest little mind, and for her second thought she was considering in an injured way that this was not love as she had read of it in novels. I didn't know just what it would be, but I didn't think it would be like this, she declared. Love, as depicted in such American novels by literary pastors and matrons of perfect purity, as had sifted into the Panama Public Library, was an affair of astounding rescues from extreme peril, of highly proper walks in lanes, of laudable industry on the part of the hero, and if not more than three kisses, one on the brow, one on the cheek, and, in the very last paragraph of the book, one daringly but reverently deposited upon the lips. These young heroes and heroines never thought about bodies at all, except when they had been deceived in a field of asterisks. So to Una there was the world old shock at the earthiness of love, and the penetrating joy of that earthiness. If real love was so much more vulgar than she had supposed, yet also it was so much more overwhelming that she was glad to be a flesh and blood lover, bruised and bewildered and estranged from herself, instead of a polite murmuror. Gradually she was drawn back into a real communion with him, when he damned the human race for serfs fighting in a dungeon, warring for land, for flags, for titles, and calling themselves kings. Walter took the same theories of socialism, single tax, unionism, which J.J. Todd of Chatham had hacked out in commercial college days, and he made them bleed and yop and be hotly human. For the first time Walter was giving her so many of those first times of life, Una realized how strong is the demand of the undermen for a conscious and scientific justice. She denied that stenographers could ever form a union, but she could not answer his assert, why not? It was not in the patiently marching Una to be a creative thinker, yet she did hunger for self-mastery, and ardently was she following the erratic jibes at civilization with which young Walter showed his delight in having an audience, when the brown, homely, golden family clock struck eleven. Heavens, she cried, you must run home at once. Good night, dear. He rose obediently, nor did their lips demand each other again. Her mother awoke to yawn. He is a very polite young man, but I don't think he is solid enough for you, dearie. If he comes again, do remind me to show him the codex of your father, like I promised. Then Una began to ponder the problem which is so weighty to girls of the city, where she could see her lover, since the parks were impolite, and her own home obtrusively dull to him. Whether Walter was apparel or not, whether or not his love was angry and red and full of hurts, yet she knew that it was more to her than her mother or her conventions or her ambitious little job. Thus gladly confessing she fell asleep, and a new office day began. For always the office claims one again the moment that the evening's freedom is over.