 CHAPTER VII These children of the city, where there is no place for love-making, for discovering and testing each other's hidden beings, ran off together in the scanted parties of the ambitious poor. CHAPTER was extravagant financially as he was mentally, but he had many debts, some conscience, and a smallness of salary. She was pleased by the smallest diversions, however, and found luxury in a bowl of chop-sui. He took her to an Italian restaurant and pointed out supposititious artists. They had gallery seats for a mod-atom's play, at which she cried and laughed wholeheartedly, and held his hand all through. Her first real tea was with him. In Panama one spoke of ladies' afternoon tea, not of tea. She was awed by his new walking stick, and the new knowledge of cinnamon toast which he displayed for her. She admired, too, the bored way he swung his stick as they sauntered into and out of the lobbies of the great hotels. The first flowers from a real florist's, which she had ever received except for a bunch of carnations from Henry Carson at Panama High School commencement, came from Walter, long-stemmed roses in damp paper in a florist's box with Walter's card inside. And perhaps the first time that she had ever really seen spring, felt the intense light of sky and cloud and fresh greenery as her own, was on a Sunday just before the fragrant first of June, when Walter and she slipped away from her mother and walked in Central Park, shabby but unconscious. She explored with him, too, felt adventurous in quite respectable Japanese and Greek and Syrian restaurants. But her mother waited for her at home, and the job, the office, the desk, demanded all her energy. Had they seen each other less frequently, perhaps Walter would have let dreams serve for real kisses and have been satisfied. But he saw her a hundred times a day, and yet their love progressed so little. The propinquity of the office tantalized them, and Mrs. Golden kept them apart. The woman who had aspired and been idle while Captain Golden had toiled for her, who had mourned and been idle while Una had planned for her, and who had always been a compound of selfishness and love, was more and more accustomed to taking her daughter's youth to feed her comfort and her canary, a bird of atrophied voice and uncleanly habit. If this were the history of the people who wait at home instead of the history of the warriors, rich credit would be given to Mrs. Golden for enduring the long, lonely days listening for Una's step. A proud, patient woman with nothing to do all day but pick at a little housework and read her eyes out and wish that she could run in and be neighborly with the indifferent urbanites who formed about her a wall of ice. Yet so confused are human purposes that this good woman who adored her daughter also sapped her daughter's vigor. As the office loomed behind all of Una's desires, so behind the office in turn was ever the shadowy thought of the appealing figure there at home, and toward her mother Una was very compassionate. Yes, and so was her mother. Mrs. Golden liked to sit soft and read stories of young love, partly by nature and partly because she had learned that thus she could best obtain her wishes. She was gentle as a well-filled cat, and delicate as a tulle scarf. She was admiringly adhesive to Una as she had been to Captain Golden, and she managed the new master of the house just as she had managed the former one. She listened to dictates pleasantly, was perfectly charmed at suggestions that she do anything, and then gracefully forgot. Mrs. Golden was a mistress of graceful forgetting. Just never did she remember to do anything she didn't want to do. She did not lie about it. She really and quite beautifully did forget. Una, hurrying off to the office every morning, agonized with the effort to be on time, always had to stop and prepare a written list of the things her mother was to do. Otherwise, bespelled by the magazine stories which she kept forgetting and innocently re-reading, Mrs. Golden would forget the marketing, forget to put the potatoes on to boil, forget to scrub the bathroom, and she often contrived to lose the written list and searched for it with trembling lips but no vast persistence. Una, bringing home the palsying weariness of the day's drudgery, would find a cheery welcome and the work not done, no vegetables for dinner, no fresh boric acid solution prepared for washing her stinging eyes. Nor could Una herself get the work immediately out of the way, because her mother was sure to be lonely, to need comforting before Una could devote herself to anything else or even wash away the sticky office grime. Mrs. Golden would have been shocked into a stroke, could she have known that while Una was greeting her, she was muttering within herself. I do wish I could brush my teeth first. If Una was distraught, desirous of disappearing in order to get hold of herself, Mrs. Golden would sigh, Dear, have I done something to make you angry? In any case, whether Una was silent or vexed with her, the mother would manage to be hurt but brave, sweetly distressed but never quite tearful, and Una would have to kiss her, pat her hair before she could escape and begin to get dinner, with her mother helping, always ready to do anything that Una's doggedly tired mind might suggest but never suggesting novelties herself. After dinner, Mrs. Golden was always ready to do whatever Una wished, to play cribbage or read aloud or go for a walk, not a long walk, she was so delicate, you know, but a nice little walk with her dear, dear daughter. For such amusements she was ready to give up all her own favorite evening diversions, namely playing solitaire and reading and taking nice little walks, but she did not like to have Una go out and leave her, nor have naughty, naughty men like Walter take Una to the theater as though they wanted to steal the dear daughter away. When she wore Una's few good frocks and forgot to freshen them in time for Una to wear them, otherwise Mrs. Golden had the unselfishness of a saint on a marble pillar. Una, it is true, sometimes voiced her irritation over her mother's forgetfulness and her subsequent pathos, but for that bitterness she always blamed herself with horror remembered each cutting word she had said to the little mother saint, as in still hours when they sat clasped like lovers she tremblingly called her. Mrs. Golden's demand of Una for herself had never been obvious till it clashed with Walter's demand. Una and Walter talked it over, but they seemed mutely to agree after the evening of Mrs. Golden in conversation, that it was merely balking for him to call at the flat. Nor did Una and Mrs. Golden discuss why Mr. Babson did not come again, or whether Una was seeing him. Una was accustomed to say only that she would be away this evening, but over the teapot she quoted Walter's opinions on Omar, agnosticism, motor magazines, pipe smoking, Staten Island, and the Himalayas, and it was evident that she was often with him. Mrs. Golden's method of opposition was very simple. Whenever Una announced that she was going out, her mother's bright, bird-like eyes filmed over. She sighed and hesitated, Shall I be alone all evening, after all day, too? Una felt like a brute. She tried to get her mother to go to the sessions as flat more often, to make new friends, but Mrs. Golden had lost all her adaptability. She clung to Una and to her old furniture as the only recognizable parts of her world. And Una felt forced to refuse Walter's invitations. Always she refused to walk with him on the long, splendid Saturday afternoons of freedom. Nor would she let him come and sit on the roof with her, lest her mother see them in the hall and be hurt. So it came to pass that only in public did she meet Walter. He showed his resentment by inviting her out less and less, by telling her less and less frankly his ambitions and his daily dabs at becoming a great man. Apparently he was rather interested in a flower-faced actress at his boarding-house. Never now did he speak of marriage. The one time when he had spoken of it, Una had been so sure of their happiness that she had thought no more of that formality than had his reckless self, but now she yearned to have him propose in the most stupid, conventional, pink romance fashion. Why can't we be married? She fancied herself saying to him, but she never dared say it aloud. Often he was abstracted when he was with her, in the office or out. Because he was kindly, but the kindness seemed artificial. She could not read his thoughts, now that she had no hand-clasp to guide her. On a hot, quivering afternoon of early July, Walter came to her desk at closing-hour and said abruptly, Look, you've simply got to come out with me this evening. We'll dine at a little place at the foot of the palisades. I can't stand seeing you so little. I won't ask you again. You aren't fair. Oh, I don't mean to be unfair. Will you come? Will you? His voice glared. Regardless of the office folk about them, he put his hand over hers. She was sure that Miss Moynihan was bulkily watching them. She dared not take time to think. Yes, she said, I will go. It was a beer garden frequented by yachtless German yachtsmen in shirt sleeves, boating caps, and mustaches like muffs, but to Una it was Europe and the banks of the Rhine, that restaurant below the palisades where she dined with Walter. A placid hour it was, as dusk grew deeper and more fragrant, and they leaned over the terrace rail to meditate on the light springing out like laughing jests incarnate, reflected lights of steamers paddling with singing excursionists up the Hudson to the storied hills of Rip Van Winkle, imperial sweeps of fire that outlined the mighty city across the river. Walter was at peace. He spared her his swart intensity. He shyly quoted Tennyson and bounced with cynicism about Sherbert Souse and the gas bag. He brought happiness to her instead of the agitation of his kisses. She was not an office machine now, but one with the village lovers of poetry, as her job exhaustion found relief in the magic of the hour, in the ancient music of the river, in breezes which brought old tales down from the cat-skills. She would have been content to sit there for hours, listening to the twilight, absently pleading the coarse tablecloth, trying to sip the saline claret which he insisted on their drinking. She wanted nothing more, and she had so maneuvered their chairs that the left side of her face, the better side, was toward him. But Walter grew restless. He stared at the German yachtsmen, at their children who ate lumps of sugar dipped in claret, and their wives who drank beer. He commented needlessly on a cat which prowled along the terrace rail. He touched Una's foot with his, and suddenly condemned himself for not having been able to bring her to a better restaurant. He volubley pointed out that their roast chicken had been petrified, vile restaurant, very vile food. Why, I love it here, she protested. I'm perfectly happy to be just like this. As she turned to him with a smile that told all her tenderness, she noted how his eyes kept stealing from the river side to her and back again, how his hands trembled as he clapped two thick glass salt-shakers together, a current of uneasiness darted between them. He sprang up. Oh, I can't sit still, he said. Come on, let's walk down along the river. Oh, can't we just sit here and be quiet? She pleaded, but he rubbed his chin and shook his head and sputtered. Oh, rats, you can't see the river now that they've turned on the electric lights here. Come on, besides, it'll be cooler right by the river. She felt a menace. The darkness beyond them was no longer dreaming but terror-filled. She wanted to refuse, but he was so fretfully demanding that she could only obey him. Up on the crest of the palisades is an amusement park, and suburbs and crowded paths, and across the river is New York, in a solid mass of apartment houses. But between palisades and river, at the foot of the cliffs, is an unfrequented path which still keeps some of the wildness it had when it was a warpath of the Indians. It climbs ridges, twists among rocks, dips into damp hollows, widens out into tiny bowling greens for Hendrick Hudson's ferrymen. By night it is ghostly, and beside it the river whispers strange tragedies. Along this path the city children crept, unspeaking, save when his two hands, clasping her waist to guide her down a rocky descent, were clamorous. Where a bare sand-jetty ran from the path out into the river's broad current, Walter stopped and whispered, I wish we could go swimming. I wish we could, it's quite warm, she said prosaically. But river and dark woods and breeze overhead seemed to whisper to her, whisper, whisper, all the shrouded night aquiver with low, eager whispers. She shivered to find herself imagining the unimaginable, that she might throw off her stodgy office clothes, her dull cloth skirt and neat blouse, and go swimming beside him, revel in giving herself up to the utter frankness of cool water, laving her bare flesh. She closed her mind. She did not condemn herself for wanting to bathe as Mother Eve had bathed, naked and unafraid. She did not condemn herself, but neither did she excuse. She was simply afraid. She dared not try to make new standards. She took refuge in the old standards of the good little una, though all about her called the enticing voices of night and the river, yet she listened for the tried council voices of the plain Panama streets and the busy office. While she struggled, Walter stood with his arm fitted about her shoulder, letting the pregnant silence speak, till again he insisted, Why couldn't we go swimming? Then with all the cruelly urgent lovers of the days of hungry poetry, we're going to let youth go by and never dare to be mad. Time will get us, we'll be old, it will be too late to enjoy being mad. His lyric cry dropped to a small boy excuse. As it wouldn't hurt, come on, think of plunging in. No, no, no, no, she cried, and ran from him up the jetty back to the path. She was not afraid of him, because she was so much more afraid of herself. He followed sullenly as the path led them farther and farther. She stopped on a rise, and found herself able to say calmly, Don't you think we'd better go back now? Maybe we ought to, but sit down here. He hunched up his knees, rested his elbows on them, and said, abstractedly, apparently talking to himself as much as to her, I'm sorry I've been so grouchy coming down the path, but I don't apologize for wanting us to go swimming. Civilization, the world's office manager, tells us to work like fiends all day and be lonely and respectable all evening, and not even marry till we're thirty because we can't afford to. That's all right for them as likes to become nice, varnished desks, but not for me. I'm going to hunger and thirst and satisfy my appetites, even if it makes me selfish as the devil. I'd rather be that than be a brand-stuffed automaton that's never human enough to hunger. But of course you're naturally a Puritan and always will be one, no matter what you do. You're a good sort, I trust you to the limit, you're sincere and you want to grow. But me, my Vandiyar isn't over yet. Maybe sometime we'll again. I admire you, but if I weren't a little mad I'd go literally mad. Mad. Mad. He suddenly undid the first button of her blouse and kissed her neck harshly while she watched him in a maze. He abruptly fastened the button again, sprang up, stared out at the wraith-filled darkness over the river while his voice droned on as though it were a third person speaking. I suppose there's a million cases a year in New York of crazy young chaps making violent love to decent girls and withdrawing because they have some hidden decency themselves. I'm ashamed that I'm one of them, me. I'm as bad as a nice little YMCA boy. I bow to conventions, too. Lordy, the fact that I'm so old-fashioned is even to talk about conventions in this age of shaw and denunzio shows that I'm still a small-town district school radical. I'm really as mid-Victorian as you are, in knowledge, only I'm modern by instinct, and the combination will always keep me half-baked, I suppose. I don't know what I want from life, and if I did I wouldn't know how to get it. I'm a middle-western farmer, and yet I regard myself about half the time as an Oxford man with a training in Paris. You're lucky, girl. You have a definite ambition, either to be married and have babies or to boss an office. Whatever I did, I'd spoil you. At least I would till I found myself, found out what I wanted. Lord, how I hope I do find myself some day. Poor boy, she suddenly interrupted. It's all right. Come, we'll go home and try to be good. Wonderful. There speaks the American woman, perfectly. You think I'm just chattering. You can't understand that I was never so desperately and earnest in my life. Well, to come down to cases, specification A. I couldn't marry you, because we haven't either of us got any money. Aside from my not having found myself yet, ditto B. We can't play, just because you are a Puritan and I'm a typical intellectual climber. Same C. I've actually been offered a decent job in the advertising department of a motor car company in Omaha, and now I think I'll take it. And that was all that he really had to say, just that last sentence, though for more than an hour they disgust themselves and their uncharted world, Walter trying to be honest, yet to leave with her a better impression of himself, Una trying to keep him with her. It was hard for her to understand that Walter really meant all he said. But like him, she was frank. There are times in any perplexed love when the lovers revel in bringing out just those problems and demands and complaints which they have most carefully concealed. At such a time of mutual confession, if the lovers are honest and tender, there is none of the abrasive hostility of a vulgar quarrel. But the kindness of the review need not imply that it is profitable. Often it ends, as it began, with the wail, What can we do? But so much alike are all the tribe of lovers that the debaters never fail to stop now and then to congratulate themselves on being so frank. Thus Una and Walter, after a careful survey of the facts that he was too restless, that she was too Panamanian and too much mothered, after much argument as to what he had meant when he had said this, and what she had thought he meant when he had said that, and whether he could ever have been so inconsiderate as to have said the other, and frequent admiration of themselves for their open-mindedness, the questing lovers were of the same purpose as at the beginning of their inquiry. He still felt the urge to take up his pilgrimage again, to let the decent job and Omaha carry him another stage in his search for the shrouded gods of his nebulous faith. As she still begged for a chance to love, to be needed, still declared that he was merely running away from himself. They had quite talked themselves out before he sighed, I don't dare to look and see what time it is, come, we'll have to go. They swung arms together shyly as they stumbled back over the path. She couldn't believe that he really would go off to the west, of which she was so ignorant. But she felt as though she were staggering into a darkness, blinder and ever more blind. When she got home she found her mother awake, very angry over Una's staying out till after midnight, and very wordy about the fact that, that nice clean young man, Mr. J. J. Todd of Chatham and of the commercial college, had come to call that evening. Una made little answer to her. Through her still and sacred agony she could scarce hear her mother's petulant whining. Next morning at the office, Walter abruptly asked her to come out into the hall, told her that he was leaving without notice that afternoon. She could never bear to delay once he had started out on the long trail, he said, not looking at her. He hastily kissed her and darted back into the office. She did not see him again till at five-thirty he gave noisy farewell to all the adoring stenographers and office boys, and ironical congratulations to his disapproving chiefs. He stopped at her desk, hesitated noticeably, then said, Good-bye, Goldie, and passed on. She stared, hypnotized, as, for the last time, Walter went bouncing out of the office. A week later J. J. Todd called on her again. He was touching in his description of his faithful labor for the Charity Organization Society. But she felt dead. She could not get herself to show approval. It was his last call. Walter wrote to her on the train, a jumbled rhapsody on missing her honest companionship. Then a lively description of his new chief at Omaha. A lonely letter on a barren evening, saying that there was nothing to say. A note about a new project of going to Alaska. She did not hear from him again. For weeks she missed him so tragically that she found herself muttering over and over. Now I shan't ever have a baby that would be a little image of him. When she thought of the shy games and silly love words she had lavished, she was ashamed and wondered if they had made her seem a fool to him. But presently in the week's unchanging routine she found an untroubled peace, and in mastering her work she had more comfort than ever in his clamorous summons. At home she tried not merely to keep her mother from being lonely, but actually to make her happy, to coax her to break into the formidable city. She arranged summer evening picnics with the Sessions's. She persuaded them to hold one of these picnics at the foot of the Palisades. During it she disappeared for nearly half an hour. She sat alone by the river. Finally with a feverish wrench she bared her breast, then shook her head angrily, rearranged her blouse, went back to the group, and was unusually gay, though all the while she kept her left hand on her breast as though it pained her. She had been with the Gazette for only a little over six months, and she was granted only a week's vacation. Thus she spent with her mother at Panama. In parties with old neighbors she found sweetness, and on a motor trip with Henry Carson and his fiance, a young widow, she let the fleeting sun-flect land absorb her soul. At the office Una was transferred to S. Herbert Ross's department upon Walters leaving. She sometimes took S. Herbert's majestic flowing dictation. She tried not merely to obey his instructions, but also to discover his unvoiced wishes. Her wage was raised from eight dollars a week to ten. She again determined to be a real businesswoman. She read a small manual on advertising. But no one in the Gazette office believed that a woman could bear responsibilities, not even S. Herbert Ross, with his aphorisms for stenographers, his prose poems about the ecstatic joy of running a typewriter nine hours a day, which appeared in large, juicy-looking type in business magazines. She became bored, mechanical, somewhat hopeless. She planned to find a better job and resign, in which frame of mind she was rather contemptuous of the Gazette office, and it was an unforgettable shock suddenly to be discharged. Ross called her in on a winter afternoon, told her that he had orders from the owner to reduce the force because of a change of policy, and that, though he was sorry, he would have to let her go because she was one of the most recent additions. He assured her royally that he had been pleased by her work, that he would be glad to give her the best kind of a recommend, and if the situation loosens up again, I'd be tickled to death to have you drop in and see me. Just between us, I think the owner will regret this tightwad policy. But Mr. S. Herbert Ross continued to go out to lunch with the owner, and Una went through all the agony of not being wanted even in the prison she hated. No matter what the reason, being discharged is the final insult in an office, and it made her timid as she began wildly to seek a new job. CHAPTER VIII. In novels and plays, architects usually are delicate young men who wear silky, van dyke beards, play the piano, and do a good deal with pictures and rugs. They leap with desire to erect charming cottages for the poor and to win prize contests for the Jackson County Courthouse. They always have good taste. They are perfectly mad about simplicity and gracefulness. But from the number of flat-faced houses and three-toned wooden churches still being erected, it may be deduced that somewhere there are architects who are not enervated by too much good taste. Mr. Troy Wilkins, architect, with an office in the Septimus Building, was a commuter. He wore a derby and a clipped moustache, and took interest in cameras, player pianos, sonographs, small motor cars, speedometers, tires, patent nicotine-less pipes, Jolly tobacco for Jimmy pipes, tennis rackets, correspondence courses, safety razors, optimism, Theodore Roosevelt, pocket flashlights, rubber heels, and all other well-advertised wares. He was a conservative Republican and a congregationalist, and on his desk he kept three silver-framed photographs, one of his wife and two children, one of his dog, Rover, and one of his architectural masterpiece, the mansion of Peter B. Reardon, the Copper King of Montana. Mr. Troy Wilkins lamented the passing of the solid and expensive stone residences of the nineties, but he kept up to date, and he had added ideals about half-timbered villas, doorway settles, garages, and sleeping-porches to his repertoire. He didn't, however, as he often said, believe in bungalows any more than he believed in these labor unions. Una Golden had been the chief of Mr. Troy Wilkins's two stenographers for seven months now, mid-summer of 1907, when she was twenty-six. She had climbed to thirteen dollars a week. The few hundred dollars which she had received from Captain Golden's insurance were gone, and her mother and she had to make a science of saving, economize on milk, on bread, on laundry, on toothpaste. But that didn't really matter, because Una never went out except for walks and moving picture shows with her mother. She had no need, no want of clothes to impress suitors. She had four worn letters from Walter Babson, which she reread every week or two. She had her mother and, always, her job. Una and Aaron Boy, and a young Eastside Jewish stenographer named Bessie Craker, made up the office force of Troy Wilkins. The office was on the eighth floor of the Septimus Building, which is a lean, jerry-built, flashingly pretentious cement structure, with cracking walls and dirty, tiled hallways. The smeary red-gold paint, which hides the imperfect ironwork of its elevators, does not hide the fact that they groan like lost souls, and tremble and jerk and threaten to fall. The Septimus Building is typical of at least one half of a large city. It was run up by a speculative builder for a quick turnover. It is semi-fireproof, but more semi than fireproof. It stands on Nassau Street, between two portly stone buildings that try to squeeze this lanky imposter to death, but there is more cheerful whistling in its hallways than in the halls of its disapproving neighbors. Here it is City Hall Park and Newspaper Row, Wall Street and the Lordly Stock Exchange. But aside from a few dull and honest tenants like Mr. Troy Wilkins, the Septimus Building is filled with offices of fly-by-night companies, shifty promoters, mining concerns, beauty parlors for petty brokers, sample shoe shops, discreet lawyers, and advertising dentists. Seven desks in one large room make up the entire headquarters of eleven international corporations, which possess, as capital, eleven hundred and thirty dollars, much embossed stationery, and the seven desks. These modest capitalists do not lease their quarters by the year. They are doing very well if they pay rent for each of four successive months. But also they do not complain about repairs. They are not fussy about demanding a certificate of moral perfection from the janitor. They speak cheerily to elevator boys and slink off into saloons. Not all of them keep Yom Kippur. They all talk of being broad-minded. Mr. Wilkins's office was small and agitated. It consisted of two rooms and an insignificant entry hall, in which last was a water cooler, a postal scale, a pile of newspapers, and a morose office boy who drew copies of Gibson Girls all day long on stray pieces of wrapping paper, and confided to Una, at least once a week, that he wanted to take a correspondence course in window dressing. In one of the two rooms Mr. Wilkins cautiously made drawings at a long table, or looked surprised over correspondence at a small old-fashioned desk, or puffed and scratched as he planned form letters to save his steadily waning business. In the other room there were the correspondence files and the desks of Una, the chief stenographer, and of slangy Eastside Bessie Craker, who conscientiously copied form letters, including all errors in them, and couldn't, as Wilkins complainingly pointed out, be trusted with dictation which included any words more difficult than sincerely. From their window the two girls could see the windows of an office across the street. About once a month an interesting curly-haired youth leaned out of one of the windows opposite, otherwise there was no view. The hour at which most of the offices closed on Saturday in summer was excitedly approaching. The office women throughout the Septimus building, who had been showing off their holiday frocks all morning, were hastily finishing letters, or rushing to the women's washrooms to discuss with one another the hang of new skirts. The whole morning Bessie Craker had kept up a monologue, beginning, Say, listen, Miss Golden, say, gee, I was going down to South Beach with my gentleman friend this afternoon, and say, what do you think the piker had to go and get stuck for? He's got to work all afternoon. I don't care, I don't care. I'm going to Coney Island with Sadie, and I bet you we pick up some fellows and do the light fantastic till one GM. Oh, you sad sea waves. I bet Sadie and me make him sad. But we'll be straight, said Bessie, half an hour later, apropos of nothing. But gee, it's fierce to not have any good times without you take a risk. But gee, my dad would kill me if I went wrong. He reads the tall mood all the time, and hates goys, but gee, I can't stand it all the time being a molly-cattle. I wished I was a boy. I'd be an aviator. Bessie had a proud new blouse with a deep V, the edges of which gaped a bit, and suggested that by ingenuity one could see more than was evident at first. Troy Wilkins, while pretending to be absent-mindedly fussing about a correspondence file that morning, had forgotten that he was much married, and had peered at the V. Una knew it, and the sordidness of that curiosity so embarrassed her that she stopped typing to clutch at the throat of her own high-necked blouse, her heart throbbing. She wanted to run away. She had a vague desire to help Bessie, who purred at poor good Mr. Wilkins, and winked at Una, and chewed gum enjoyably, who was brave and hardy and perfectly able to care for herself, an organism modified by the ghetto to the life which still bewildered Una. Mr. Wilkins went home at eleven-seventeen, after giving them enough work to last till noon. The office boy chattely disappeared two minutes later, while Bessie went two minutes after that. Her delay was due to the adjustment of her huge straw hat, piled with pink roses and tufts of blue melines. Una stayed till twelve. Her ambition had solidified into an unreasoning conscientiousness. With Bessie gone, the office was so quiet that she hesitated to type-write, lest they sneak up on her. They who dwell in silent offices, as they dwell beneath a small boy's bed at night. The hush was intimidating. Her slightest movement echoed. She stopped the sharply tapping machine after every few words to listen. At twelve she put on her hat, with two jabs of the hatpins, and hastened to the elevator, exulting in freedom. The elevator was crowded with girls in new white frocks, valuable about their afternoon's plans. One of them carried a wicker suitcase. She was, she announced, starting on her two-weeks vacation. There would be some boys, and she was going to have a peach of a time. Una and her mother had again spent a week of June in Panama, and she now recalled the bright, free mornings and lingering, wonderful twilight. She had no place to go this holiday afternoon, and she longed to join a noisy, excited party. Of Walter Babson she did not think. She stubbornly determined to snatch this time of freedom. Why, of course, she asserted she could play by herself quite happily. With a spurious gaiety she padded her small black handbag. She skipped across to the Sixth Avenue elevated, and went up to the department store district. She made elaborate plans for the great adventure of shopping. Bessie Craker had insisted, with the nonchalant shrillness of eighteen, that Una had onto wear more color. And Una had found, in the fashion section of a woman's magazine, the suggestion for exactly the thing, a modest, attractive frock of brown with smart touches of orange. And economical, she had the dress planned, ribbon-belt half brown and half orange, a collar edged with orange, cuffs slashed with it. There were a score of mild matter-of-fact Unas on the same elevated train with her, in their black hats and black jackets and black skirts and white wastes, with one hint of coquetry in a white-laced jabot or a white-laced veil, faces slightly shallow or channeled with care, but eyes that long to flare with love, women whom life didn't want except to type its letters about invoices of rubber heels, women who would have given their salvation for the chance to sacrifice themselves for love. And there was one man on that elevated train, a well-bathed man with cynical eyes, who read a little book with a florid gold cover all about Clytemnestra, because he was certain that modern cities have no fine romance, no high tragedy, that you must go back to the Greeks for real feeling. He often aphorized, frightfully hackneyed to say, woman's place is in the home, but really, you know, these women going to offices, vulgarizing all their fine womanliness, and this shrieking sisterhood going in for suffrage and lord knows what. Give me the reticences of the harem rather than one of these office women with gum-chewing vacuities, none of them clever enough to be tragic. He was ever so whimsical about the way in which the suffrage movement had cheated him of the chance to find a grand amorous. He sat opposite Una in the train and solemnly read his golden book. He did not see Una watch with shy desire every movement of a baby that was talking to its mother in some unknown dialect of babyland. He was feeling deep sensations about Clytemnestra's misfortunes, though he controlled his features in the most gentlemanly manner, and rose composately at his station, letting a well-bred glance of pity fall upon the gum-chewers. Una found a marvelously clean new restaurant on 6th Avenue, with lace curtains at the window and, between the curtains, a red geranium in a pot covered with red crepe paper tied with green ribbon, a new place. She was tired of the office, the elevated, the flat on 148th Street, the restaurants where she tediously had her weekday lunches. She entered the new restaurant briskly, swinging her black bag. The place had personality. The white enameled tables were set diagonally and closed with strips of Japanese touting. Una smiled at a lively photograph of two bunnies in a basket. With the sensation of freedom and novelty, she ordered coffee, chicken patty, and coconut layer cake. But the patty and the cake were very much like the hundreds of other patties and cakes which she had consumed during the past two years, and the people about her were of the horde of lonely workers who make up half of New York. The holiday enchantment dissolved. She might as well be going back to the office grind after lunch. She brooded, while outside in that seething summer street the pageant of life passed by and no voice summoned her. Men and girls and motors, people who laughed and waged commerce for the reward of love, they passed her by, life passed her by, a spectator untouched by joy or noble tragedy, a woman desperately hungry for life. She began, but not bitterly, she was a good little thing, you know, to make the old familiar summary. She had no lover, no friend, no future. Walter, he might be dead or married. Her mother and the office between them left her no time to seek lover or friend or success. She was a prisoner of affection and conscience. She rose and paid her check. She did not glance at the picture of the bunnies in a basket. She passed out heavily, a woman of sterile sorrow. Una recovered her holiday by going shopping. An aisle man in the dress goods department, a magnificent creature in a braided morning coat, directed her to the counter she asked for, spoke eloquently of woollen voils, picked up her bag and remarked, Yes, we do manage to keep it cool here, even on the hottest days. A shop girl laughed with her. She stole into one of the elevators and, though she really should have gone home to her mother, she went into the music department, where, among lattices, wreathed with newly dusted roses, she listened to waltzes in two steps, played by a red-haired girl who was chewing gum and talking to a man while she played. The music roused Una to plan a wild dissipation. She would pretend that she had a sweetheart, that with him she was a roving. Una was not highly successful in her make-believe. She could not picture the imaginary man who walked beside her. She refused to permit him to resemble Walter Babson, and he refused to resemble anybody else. But she was throbbingly sure he was there as she entered a drug store and bought a Berlin Bonbon, a confection guaranteed to increase the chronic nervous indigestion from which stenographers suffer. Her shadow lover tried to hold her hand. She snatched it away and blushed. She fancied that a matron at the next tiny table was watching her silly play, reflected in the enormous mirror behind the marble soda counter. The lover vanished. As she left the drug store, Una was pretending that she was still pretending, but found it difficult to feel so very exhilarated. She permitted herself to go to a motion picture show. She looked over all the posters in front of the theatre, and a trainwreck, a seaside love scene, a detective drama, all invited her. A man in the seat in front of her in the theatre nestled toward his sweetheart and harshly muttered, Oh, you old honey. In the red light from the globe marking an exit, she saw his huge red hand with its thicket of little golden hairs creep toward the hand of the girl. Una longed for a love scene on the motion picture screen. The old, slow, familiar pain of congestion in the back of her neck came back. But she forgot the pain when the love scene did appear. In a picture of a lake shore with a hotel porch, the flat sheen of photographed water, rushing boats, and a young hero with wavy black hair, who dived for the lady and bore her out when she fell out of a reasonably safe boat. The actor's wet, white flannels clung tight about his massive legs. He threw back his head with masculine arrogance, then kissed the lady. Una was dizzy with that kiss. She was shrinking before Walter's lips again. She could feel her respectable, typewriter-hardened fingers stroke the actor's swarthy, virile jaw. She gasped with the vividness of the feeling. She was shocked at herself, told herself she was not being nice, looked guiltily about. But passionately she called for the presence of her vague, imaginary lover. Oh, my dear, my dear, my dear! She whispered, with a terrible, cloistered sweetness, whispered to love itself. Deliberately ignoring the mother who waited at home, she determined to spend a riotous evening going to a real theatre, a real play. That is, if she could get a fifty-cent seat. She could not. It's been exciting running away, even if I can't go to the theatre. Una comforted herself. I'll go down to Lady Sessions's this evening. I'll pack Mother off to bed. I'll take the Sessions's up some ice-cream, and we'll have a jolly time. Mother won't care if I go, or maybe she'll come with me. Everything all the while that her mother would not come, and decidedly would care if Una deserted her. However negligible her mother seemed from downtown, she loomed gigantic as Una approached their flat, and assured herself that she was glad to be returning to the dear one. The flat was on the fifth floor. It was a dizzying climb, particularly on this hot afternoon. As Una began to trudge up the flat-sounding slate treads, she discovered that her head was aching as though someone were pinching the top of her eyeballs. Each time she moved her head the pain came in a perceptible wave. The hallway reeked with that smell of onions and fried fish which had arrived with the first tenants. Children were dragging noisy objects about the halls. As the throb grew sharper during the centuries it took her to climb the first three flights of stairs, Una realized how hot she was, how the clammy coolness of the hall was penetrated by stabs of street heat which entered through the sun-haloed windows at the stair-landings. Una knocked at the door of her flat with that light, cheery tapping of her nails, like a fairy tattoo which usually brought her mother running to let her in. She was conscious, almost with a physical sensation, of her mother, wanted to hold her close and, in the ecstasy of that caress, squeezed the office weariness from her soul. The little mother's saint, she was coming now, she was hurrying. But the little mother was not hurrying. There was no response to Una's knock. As Una stooped in the dimness of the hallway to search in her bag for her latch-key, the pain pulsed through the top of her head again. She opened the door, and her longing for the embrace of her mother disappeared in healthy anger. The living-room was in disorder. Her mother had not touched it all day, had gone off and left it. "'This is a little too much,' Una said grimly. The only signs of life were Mrs. Golden's pack of cards for Solitaire, her worn brown Morris chair, and accretions of the cheap magazines with pretty girl covers which Mrs. Golden ransacked for love stories. Mrs. Golden had been reading all the evening before, and pages of newspapers were crumpled in her chair, not one of them picked up. The couch, where Una had slept because it had been too hot for the two of them in a double bed, was still an eruption of bedclothes. The pillow wadded up, the sheets dragging out across the unswept floor. The room represented discomfort, highly respectable poverty, and cleaning which Una had to do before she could rest. She sat down on the couch and groaned. "'To have to come home to this, I simply can't trust mother. She hasn't done one single thing, not one single thing, and if it were only the first time, but it's every day pretty nearly, she's been asleep all day and then gone for a walk. Oh yes, of course, she'll come back and say she'd forgotten this was Saturday and I'd be home early. Oh, of course!' From the bedroom came a cough, then another. Una tried to keep her soft little heart in its temporary state of hardness long enough to have some effect on household discipline. "'Hah!' she grunted. "'Got a cold again. If she'd only stay out doors a little!' She stalked to the door of the bedroom. The blind was down, the window closed, the room stifling and filled with a yellow, unwholesome glimmer. From the bed her mother's voice, changed from its usual ring to a croak that was crepuscular as the creepy room, wheezed. "'That you, dearie? I got summer cold. So sorry. Leave work undone.' "'If you would only keep your windows open, my dear mother.' Una marched to the window, snapped up the blind, banged up the sash and left the room. "'I really can't see why,' was all she added. She did not look at her mother. She slapped the living room into order as though the disordered bedclothes and newspapers were bad children. She put the potatoes on to boil. She loosened her tight collar and sat down to read the comic strips, the beauty hints, and the daily installment of the husband and wife serial in her evening paper. Una had nibbled at Shakespeare, Tennyson, Longfellow, and Vanity Fair in her high school days, but none of these had satisfied her so deeply as did the serial's hint of sex and husband. She was absorbed by it. Yet all the while she was irritably conscious of her mother's cough, hacking, sore-sounding, throat-catching. Una was certain that this was merely one of the frequent imaginary ailments of her mother, who was capable of believing that she had cancer every time she was bitten by a mosquito. But this incessant crackling made Una jumpily anxious. She reached these words in the serial. "'I cannot forget, Amy, that whatever I am, my good old mother made me, with her untiring care and the gentle words she spoke to me, when worried and harassed with doubt.' Una threw down the paper, rushed into the bedroom, crouched beside her mother, crying, "'Oh, my mother, sweetheart, you're just everything to me,' and kissed her forehead. The forehead was damp and cold like a cellar wall. Una sat bolt up in horror. Her mother's face had a dusky flush. Her lips were livid as clotted blood. Her arms were stiff, hard to the touch. Her breathing, rapid and agitated, like a frightened panting, was interrupted just then by a cough like the rattling of stiff-heavy paper, which left on her purple lips a little colorless liquid. "'Mother, mother, my little mother, you're sick! You're really sick! And I didn't know, and I spoke so harshly. Oh, what is it? What is it, mother, dear?' "'Bad, cold,' Mrs. Golden whispered. I started coughing last night. I closed the door. You didn't hear me. You were in the other room.' Another cough, wheezed dismally, shook her, gurgled in her yellow, deep-lined neck. "'Could I have window-clothes now?' "'No, I'm going to be your nurse, just an awfully cranky old nurse, and so scientific, and you must have fresh air.' Her voice broke. "'Oh, and me sleeping away from you, I'll never do it again. I don't know what I would do if anything happened to you. Do you feel any headache, dear?' "'No, not—not so much as—' Side pains me, here!' Mrs. Golden's words labored like a steamer in heavy seas. The throbbing of her heart shook them like the throb of the engines. She put her hand to her right side, shakily, with effort. It lay there, yellow against the white muslin of her nightgown, then fell heavily to the bed, like a dead thing. Luna trembled with fear as her mother continued. "'My pulse—it's so fast—so hard-breathing—side-pain. I'll put on an ice-compress, and then I'll go and get a doctor.' Mrs. Golden tried to sit up. "'Oh, no, no, no—' Not a doctor, not a doctor!' She croaked. "'Dr. Smith will be busy.' "'Well, I'll have him come when he's through.' "'Oh, no, no—' Can't afford. "'Why?' "'And they scare you so. He'd pretend I had pneumonia—' Like Sam's sister. He'd frighten me so. I just have a summer cold—' I—' I'll be all right tomorrow, dearie. "'Oh, no, no—' Please, don't—' Please, don't get a doctor. Can't afford it, can't—' At the word, which brought the sterile bitterness of winter into this fetid August room, Una was in a rigor of fear, yet galvanized with belief in her mother's bravery. "'My brave, brave little mother,' she thought. Not till Una had promised that she would not summon the doctor was her mother quieted, though Una made the promise with reservations. She relieved the pain in her mother's side with ice compresses. The ice chipped from the pitiful little cake in their tiny icebox. She freshened pillows. She smoothed sheets. She made hot broth and bathed her mother's shoulders with tepid water, and rubbed her temples with menthol. But the fever increased, and at times Mrs. Golden broke through her shallow slumber with meaningless sentences like the beginning of delirium. At midnight she was panting more and more rapidly, three times as fast as normal breathing. She was sunk in a stupor, and Una, brooding by the bed, a crouched figure of mute tragedy in the low light, grew more and more apprehensive as her mother seemed to be born away from her. Una started up. She would risk her mother's displeasure and bring the doctor. Just then, even Dr. Smith of the neighborhood practice and obstetrical habits seemed a miracle worker. She had to go four blocks to the nearest drug store that would be open at this time of night, and there telephone the doctor. She was aware that it was raining, for the firescape outside shone wet in the light from a window across the narrow court. She discovered she had left Macintosh and Umbrella at the office. Stopping only to set out a clean towel, a spoon, and a glass on the chair by the bed, Una put on the old sweater which she secretly wore under her cheap thin jacket in winter. She lumbered wearily downstairs. She prayed, confusedly, that God would give her back her headache and in reward make her mother well. She was downstairs at the heavy, grilled door. Rain was pouring. A light, six stories up in the apartment house across the street, seemed infinitely distant and lonely, curtained from her by the rain. Water splashed in the street and gurgled in the gutters. It did not belong to the city as it would have belonged to brown woods or prairie. It was violent here, shocking and terrible. It took distinct effort for Una to wade out into it. The modern city, subway, asphalt, a wireless message winging overhead, and Una Golden, an office woman in eyeglasses. Yet sickness and rain and night were abroad, and it was a clumsily wrapped peasant woman bent shoulder and heavily breathing, who trudged unprotected through the dark side streets as though she were creeping along moreland paths. Her thought was dull to everything but physical discomfort and the illness which menaced the beloved. Woman's eternal agony for the sick of her family had transformed the trim smoothness of the office woman's face into wrinkles that were tragic and ruggedly beautiful. Again Una climbed the endless stairs to her flat. She unconsciously counted the beat of the weary, regular rhythm which her feet made on the slate treads and the landings. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, landing, turn, and one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, over and over. At the foot of the last flight she suddenly believed that her mother needed her this instant. She broke the regular thumping rhythm of her climb, dashed up, cried out at the seconds wasted in unlocking the door. She tiptoed into the bedroom and found her mother just as she had left her. In Una's low groan of gladness there was all the world's self-sacrifice, all the fidelity to a cause or to a love, but as she sat unmoving she came to feel that her mother was not there, her being was not in this wreck upon the bed. In an hour the doctor soothed his way into the flat. He was afraid there might be just a little touch of pneumonia. With breezy fatherliness which in spirited Una he spoke of the possible presence of pneumococcus, of doing magic things with Romer's serum, of trusting in God, of the rain, of cold baths, and digitaline. He padded Una's head and cheerily promised to return at dawn. He yawned and smiled at himself. He looked as roundly, fuzzily sleepy as a bunny rabbit, but in the quiet, forlorn room of night and illness he radiated trust in himself. Una said to herself, he certainly must know what he is talking about. She was sure that the danger was over. She did not go to bed, however. She sat stiffly in the bedroom and planned amusements for her mother. She would work harder, earn more money. They would move to a cottage in the suburbs where they would have chickens and roses and a kitten, and her mother would find neighborly people again. Five days after, late on a bright, cool afternoon, when all the flats about them were thinking of dinner, her mother died. There was a certain madness in Una's grief. Her agony was a big, simple, uncontrollable emotion, like the fanaticism of a crusader, alarming it was, not to be reckoned with, and beautiful as a storm. Yet it was no more morbid than the little fits of rage with which a schoolteacher relieves her cramped spirit. For the first time she had the excuse to exercise her full power of emotion. Una evoked an image of her mother as one who had been altogether good, understanding, clever, and unfortunate. She regretted every moment she had spent away from her, remembered with scorn that she had planned to go to the theatre the preceding Saturday, instead of sanctifying the time in the nirvana of the beloved's presence, repented with writhing agony having spoken harshly about neglected household duties. She even contrived to find it a virtue in her mother that she had so often forgotten the daily tasks. Her mind had been too fine for such things. Una retraced their life. But she remembered everything only as one remembers under the sway of music. If I could just have another hour, just one hour with her, and feel her hands on my eyes again. On the night before the funeral she refused to let even Mrs. Sessions stay with her. She did not want to share her mother's shadowy presence with anyone. She lay on the floor beside the bed where her mother was stately in death. It was her last chance to talk to her. Mother? Mother? Don't you hear me? It's Una calling. Can't you answer me this one last time? Oh, mother, think, mother dear, I can't ever hear your voice again if you don't speak to me now. Don't you remember how we went home to Panama, our last vacation? Don't you remember how happy we were down at the lake? Little mother, you haven't forgotten, have you? Even if you don't answer, you know I'm watching by you, don't you? See, I'm kissing your hand. Oh, you did want me to sleep near you again this last night. Oh, my God, oh, my God, the last night I shall ever spend with her. The very last, last night. All night long the thin voice came from the little white-clad figure, so insignificant in the dimness. Now lying motionless on the comforter she had spread beside the bed, and talking in a tone of ordinary conversation that was uncanny in this room of invisible whispers. Now leaping up to kiss the dead hand in a panic lest it should already be gone. The funeral filled the house with intruders. The drive to the cemetery was irritating. She wanted to leap out of the carriage. At first she concentrated on the cushion beside her till she thought of nothing in the world but the faded, bottle-green upholstery and a ridiculous drift of dust in the tufting. But someone was talking to her. It was awkward, Mr. Sessions, for shrewd Mrs. Sessions had the genius to keep still. He kept stammering the most absurd platitudes about how happy her mother must be in a heaven regarding which he did not seem to have very recent or definite knowledge. She was annoyed, not comforted. She wanted to break away, to find her mother's presence again in that sacred place where she had so recently lived and spoken. Yet when Una returned to the flat, something was gone. She tried to concentrate on thought about immortality. She found that she had absolutely no facts upon which to base her thought. The hundreds of good, sound, orthodox sermons she had heard gave her nothing but vague pictures of an eternal church supper somewhere in the clouds. Nothing, blankly and terribly nothing, that answered her bewildered wonder as to what had become of the spirit which had been there and now was gone. In the midst of her mingling of longing and doubt she realized that she was hungry and she rather regretted having refused Mrs. Sessions's invitation to dinner. She moved slowly about the kitchen. The rheumatic old canary hobbled along the floor of his cage and tried to sing. At that Una wept. She never will hear poor Dicky sing again. Hasteily she remembered, as clearly as though she were actually listening to the voice and words that her mother had burst out. Draught that bird it does seem as if every time I try to take a nap he just tries to wake me up. Una laughed grimly. Hasteily she reproved herself. Oh, but mother didn't mean. But in memory of that healthily vexed voice it seemed less wicked to take notice of food, and after a reasonable dinner she put on her kimono and bedroom slippers, carefully arranged the pillows on the couch, and lay among them meditating on her future. For half an hour she was a fire with an eager thought. Why can't I really make a success of business, now that I can entirely devote myself to it? There's women in real estate and lawyers and magazine editors, some of them make ten thousand a year. So Una Golden ceased to live a small town life in New York. So she became a genuine part of the world of offices, took thought and tried to conquer this new way of city dwelling. Maybe I can find out if there's anything in life, now, besides working for TW till I'm scrapped like an old machine, she pondered, how I hate letters about two family houses in Flatbush. She dug her knuckles into her forehead in the effort to visualize the problem of the hopeless women in industry. She was an average young woman on a job. She thought in terms of money and offices. Yet she was one with all the men and women, young and old, who were creating a new age. She was nothing in herself, yet as the molecule of water belongs to the ocean, so Una Golden humbly belonged to the leaven who, however confusedly, were beginning to demand. Why, since we have machinery, science, courage, need we go on tolerating war and poverty and caste and uncoothness and all that sheer clumsiness? End of CHAPTER VIII. The effect of grief is commonly reputed to be noble, but mostly it is a sterile nobility. Witness the widows who drape their musty weeds over all the living. Witness the mother of a son killed in war, who urges her son's comrades to bring mourning to the mothers of all the sons on the other side. Grief is a paralyzing poison. It broke down Una's resistance to the cares of the office. Hers was no wholesome labor in which she could find sacred forgetfulness. It was the round of unessentials which all office women know so desperately well. She bruised herself by shrinking from those hourly insults to her intelligence. And outside the office, her most absorbing comfort was in the luxury of mourning, passion in black, even to the black edged face veil. Though she was human enough to realize that with her fair hair she looked rather well in mourning and shrewd enough to get it on credit at excellent terms. She was in the office all day, being as curtly exact as she could, but in the evening she sat alone in her flat and feared the city. Sometimes she rushed down to the sessions as flat, but the good people bored her with their assumption that she was panting to know all the news from Panama. She had drifted so far away from the town that the sixth assertion that it was a great pity Kitty Wilson was going to marry that worthless Clark boy aroused no interest in her. She was still more bored by their phonograph on which they played over and over the same twenty records. She would make quick, unconvincing excuses about having to hurry away. Their slippered stupidity was a desecration of her mother's memory. Her half hysterical fear of the city's power was increased by her daily encounter with the clamorous streets, crowded elevators, frantic lunchrooms, and most of all the experience of the subway. Amazing, incredible the subway, and the fact that human beings could become used to it, consent to spend an hour in it daily. There was a heroic sigh to this spectacle of steel trains clanging at forty miles an hour beneath twenty-story buildings. The engineers had done their work well, made a great thought in steel and cement, and then the businessmen and bureaucrats had made the great thought a curse. There was in the subway all the romance which storytelling youth goes seeking. Trains crammed with an inconceivable complexity of people. Marquis of the Holy Roman Empire, Jewish factory hands, speculators from Wyoming, Iowa dairymen, quarreling Italian lovers with their dramatic tales, their flux of every human emotion under the city mask. But however striking these dramatic characters may be to the occasional spectator, they figure merely as an odor, a confusion, to the permanent surf of the subway. A long underground station, a catacomb with a cement platform, this was the chief feature of the city vista to the tired girl who waited there each morning. A clean space, but damp, stale, like the corridor to a prison, as indeed it was, since through it each morning Una entered the day's business life. Then the train approaching, filling the tunnel, like a piston smashing into a cylinder, the shoving rush to get aboard, a crush that was ruffling and fatiguing to a man but to a woman was horror. Una stood with a hulking man pressing as close to her side as he dared, and a dapper clerkling squeezed against her breast. Above her head, to represent the city's culture and graciousness, there were advertisements of soap, stockings, and collars. At curves the wheels ground with a long, savage wine. The train healed, and she was flung into the arms of the grinning clerk who held her tight. She, who must never be so unladylike as to enter a polling place, had breathed into her very mouth the clerkling's virile electoral odor of cigarettes and onions and decayed teeth. A very good thing, the subway, it did make Una quiver with the beginnings of rebellious thought as no suave preacher could ever have done. Almost hysterically she resented this daily indignity which smeared her clean, cool womanhood with a grease of noise and smell and human contact. As was the subway, so were her noons of elbowing to get impure food in restaurants. For a reward she was permitted to work all day with Troy Wilkins, and for heavens and green earth she had a chair and a desk. But the human organism, which can modify itself to arctic cold and Indian heat, to incessant labor or the long innervation of luxury, learns to endure. Unwilling dressing, lonely breakfast, the subway, dull work, lunch, sleepiness after lunch, the hopelessness of three o'clock, the boss's ill tempers, then the subway again, and a lonely flat with no love, no creative work. And at last a long sleep so that she might be fresh for such another round of delight. So went the days. Yet all through them she found amusement, laughed now and then, and proved the heroism as well as the unthinking servility of the human race. The need of feeling that there were people near to her urged Una to sell her furniture and move from the flat to a boarding house. She avoided Mrs. Sessions's advice. She was sure that Mrs. Sessions would bustle about and find her a respectable place where she would have to be cheery. She didn't want to be cheery. She wanted to think. She even bought a serious magazine with articles, not that she read it. But she was afraid to be alone any more. Anyway, she would explore the city. Of the many New Yorks, she had found only Morningside Park, Central Park, Riverside Drive, the shopping district, the restaurants and theaters which Walter had discovered to her, a few downtown office streets, and her own arid region of flats. She did not know the proliferating East Side, the factories, the endless semi-suburban stretches, nor Fifth Avenue. Her mother and Mrs. Sessions had inculcated in her the earnest idea that most parts of New York weren't quite nice. In over two years in the city, she had never seen a millionaire nor a criminal. She knew the picturesqueness neither of wealth nor of pariah poverty. She did not look like an adventurer when, at a Saturday noon of October, she left the office, slight, kindly, rather timid with her pale hair and school teacher eyeglasses, and clear cheeks set off by comely morning. But she was seizing New York. She said over and over, Why, I can go and live any place I want to, and maybe I'll meet some folks who are simply fascinating. She wasn't very definite about these fascinating folks, but they implied girls to play with, and she hesitated, and decidedly men, men different from Walter, who would touch her hand in courtly reverence. She poked through strange streets. She carried an assortment of rooms and board clippings from the want-ad page of a newspaper, and obediently followed their hints about finding the perfect place. She resolutely did not stop at places not advertised in the paper, though nearly every house in some quarters had a sign, room to rent. Una still had faith in the veracity of whatever appeared in the public prints, as compared with what she dared see for herself. The advertisements led her into a dozen parts of the city frequented by rumors, the lonely, gray, detached people who dwell in other people's houses. It was not so splendid a quest as she had hoped. It was too sharp a revelation of the cannon food of the city, the people who had never been trained, and who had lost heart. It was scarcely possible to tell one street from another, to remember whether she was on 16th Street or 26th, always the same rows of red brick or brownstone houses, all alike, the monotony broken only by infrequent warehouses or loft buildings, always the same doubtful mounting of stone steps, the same searching for a bell, the same waiting, the same slatternly suspicious landlady, the same evil hallway with a brown hat rack, a steel engraving with one corner stained with yellow, a carpet worn through to the flooring in a large oval hole just in front of the stairs, a smell of cabbage, a lack of ventilation, always the same desire to escape, though she waited politely while the landlady in the same familiar harsh voice went through the same formula. Then, before she could flee to the comparatively fresh air of the streets, Una would politely have to follow the panting landlady to a room that was a horror of dirty carpet, bumpy mattress, and furniture with everything worn off that could wear off, and at last always the same phrases by which Una meant to spare the woman, well, I'll think it over, thank you so much for showing me the rooms, but before I decide, want to look around, phrases which the landlady heard ten times a day. She conceived a great-hearted pity for landlady's. They were so patient in face of her evident distaste. Even their suspiciousness was but the growling of a beaten dog. They sighed and closed their doors on her without much attempt to persuade her to stay. Her heart ached with their lack of imagination. They had no more imagination than those landlady's of the insect world, the spiders, with their unchanging, instinctive, ancestral types of webs. Her depression was increased by the desperate physical weariness of the hunt. Not that afternoon, not till two weeks later, did she find a room in a large, long, somber railroad flat on Lexington Avenue, conducted by a curly-haired young bookkeeper and his pretty wife, who provided their clients with sympathy, with extensive and scientific data regarding the motion picture houses in the neighborhood, and board, which was neither scientific nor very extensive. It was time for Una to sacrifice the last material contact with her mother, to sell the furniture which she had known ever since as a baby in Panama. She had crawled from this horse-hair chair, all the long and perilous way across this same brown carpet, to this red-plush couch. It was not so hard to sell the furniture. She could even read and burn her father's letters with an unhappy resoluteness. Despite her tenderness, Una had something of youth's joy in getting rid of old things as preparation for acquiring the new. She did sob when she found her mother's straw hat, just as Mrs. Golden had left it, on the high shelf of the wardrobe, as though her mother might come in at any minute, put it on and start for a walk. She sobbed again when she encountered the tiny tear in the bottom of the couch, which her own baby fingers had made in trying to enlarge a pirate's cave. That brought the days when her parents were immortal and all-wise, when the home sitting room where her father read the paper aloud was a security against all the formidable world outside. But to these recollections Una could shut her heart. To one absurd thing, because it was living, Una could not shut her heart. To the senile canary. She could have taken it with her, but she felt, confusedly, that Dickie would not be appreciated in other people's houses. She evaded asking the Sessions's to shelter the bird, because every favor that she permitted from that smug family was a bond that tied her to their life of married spinsterhood. Oh, Dickie, Dickie, what am I going to do with you? She cried, slipping a finger through the wires of the cage. The canary hopped toward her and tried to chirp his greeting. Even when you were sick you tried to sing to me, and Mother did love you, she sighed. I just can't kill you, trusting me like that. She turned her back, seeking to solve the problem by ignoring it. While she was sorting dresses, some trace of her mother in every fold, every wrinkle of the wastes and lace collars, she was listening to the bird in the cage. I'll think of some way. I'll find somebody who will want you, Dickie, dear. She murmured, desperately, now and then. Her dinner and nightfall, with her nerves twanging all the more, because it seemed silly to worry over one disolute old bird when all her life was breaking up. She hysterically sprang up, snatched Dickie from the cage, and trotted downstairs to the street. I'll leave you somewhere. Somebody will find you, she declared, concealing the bird by holding it against her breast, with a hand super-sensitive to its warm little feathers. She walked till she found a deserted tenement doorway. She hastily set the bird down on a stone balustrade beside the entrance steps. Dickie chirped more cheerily, more sweetly than for many days, and confidingly hopped back to her hand. Oh, I can't leave him for boys to torture, and I can't take him. I can't. In a sudden spasm she threw the bird into the air, and ran back to the flat, sobbing. I can't kill it. I can't. There's so much death. Longing to hear the quavering affection of its song once more, but keeping herself from even going to the window to look for it. With bitter haste she completed her work of getting rid of things, things, things, the things which were stones of an imprisoning past. Shinas was over Oona when at last she was in the house of strangers. She sat marveling that this square white cubby-hole of a room was hers permanently, that she hadn't just come here for an hour or two. She couldn't get it to resemble her first impression of it. Now the hallway was actually a part of her life. Every morning she would face the picture of a magazine cover girl when she came out of her room. Her agitation was increased by the problem of keeping up the maiden modesty appropriate to a golden, a young female friend of the Sessions's, in a small flat with gentlemen lodgers in just one bathroom. Oona was saved by not having a spinster friend with whom to share her shrinking modesty. She simply had to take waiting for her turn at the bathroom as a matter of course, and insensibly she was impressed by the decency with which these dull, ordinary people solved the complexities of their enforced intimacy. When she wildly clutched her virgin bathrobe about her and passed a man in the hall, he stalked calmly by without any of the teetering apologies which broad-beamed Mr. Sessions had learned from his gentile spouse. She could not at first distinguish among her companions. Gradually they came to be distinct, important. They held numberless surprises for her. She would not have supposed that a bookkeeper in a fish market would be likely to possess charm, particularly if he combined that amorphous occupation with being a boarding-house proprietor. Yet her landlord, Herbert Gray, with his look of a track athlete, his confessions of ignorance, and his naive enthousiasms about whatever in the motion pictures seemed to him heroic, large, colorful, was as admirable as the several youngsters of her town who had plotted through Princeton or Pennsylvania and come back to practice law or medicine or gentlemanly inheritance of business. And his wife, round and comely, laughing easily, wearing her clothes with an untutored grace which made her cheap waist smart, was so thoroughly her husband's comrade in everything that these struggling nobodies had all the riches of the earth. The Grays took Una in as though she were their guest, but they did not bother her. They were city-born, taught by the city to let other people live their own lives. The Grays had taken a flat twice too large for their own use. The other lodgers who lived, like monks on a bare corridor, along the narrow railroad hall were three besides Una. A city failure, one with a hundred thousand failures, a gray-haired, neat man who had been everything and done nothing, and who now said evasively that he was in the collection business. He read Dickens and played a masterful game of chess. He liked to have it thought that his past was brave with mysterious splendors. He spoke hintingly of great lawyers, but he had been near to them only as a clerk for a large law firm. He was grateful to anyone for noticing him. Like most of the failures, he had learned the art of doing nothing at all. All Sunday, except for a two-hour's walk in Central Park and one game of chess with Herbert Gray, he dawdled in his room, slept, regarded his stocking feet with an appearance of profound meditation, yawned, picked at the Sunday newspaper. Una once saw him napping on a radiant autumn Sunday afternoon and detested him. But he was politely interested in her work for Troy Wilkins, carefully exact in saying good morning, miss, and he became as familiar to her as the gas heater in her cubicle. Second fellow lodger was a busy, reserved woman, originally from Kansas City, who had something to do with some branch library. She had solved the problems of woman's lack of place in this city scheme by closing tight her emotions, her sense of adventure, her hope of friendship. She never talked to Una after discovering that Una had no interesting opinions on the best reading for children nine to eleven. These gentle, inconsequential city waves, the grays, the failure, the library woman, meant no more to Una than the crowds who were near, yet so detached, in the streets. But the remaining border annoyed her by his noisy whine. He was an underbred maverick with sharp eyes of watery blue, a thin moustache, large teeth, and no chin worth noticing. He would bounce in of an evening, when the others were being decorous and dull in the musty dining room, and yelp. How do we all find our sesk-pedalian selves this bright and balmy evening? How does your perspicacity dissipate, Herbie? What's the good word, miss Golden? Well, well, well, if here ain't our good old friend the Reverend J. Pilkington corned beef. How are ya, Pilkey? Will Mrs. Cabbage feelin' well, too? Well, well, still discussing the movies, Herbie? Got any new opinions about Mary Pickford? Well, well, say, I met another guy that's as nutty as you, Herbie. He thinks that Wilhelm Jenkins-Brian is a great statesman. Let's hear some more about the sage of free silver, Herbie. The little man was never content till he had drawn them into so bitter an argument that someone would rise, throw down a napkin, growl, well, if that's all you know about it, if you're all as ignorant as that, you simply ain't worth arguing with, and stalk out. When general topics failed, the disturber would cataclyse the library woman about Louisa M. Alcott, or the failure about his desultery inquiries into Christian science, or Mrs. Gray about the pictures plastering the dining-room, a dozen spiritual revelations of apples and oranges which she had bought at a department store sale. The maverick's name was Philmore J. Benson. Strangers called him Benny, but his more intimate acquaintances, those to whom he had talked for at least an hour, were requested to call him Phil. He made a number of pretty puns about his first name. He was, surprisingly, a doctor, not the sort that studies science, but the sort that studies the gullibility of human nature, a doctor of manipulative osteology. He had earned a diploma by a correspondence course, and had scrabbled together a small practice among retired shopkeepers. He was one of the strange impudent race of fakers who prey upon the clever city. He didn't expect anyone at the graze to call him a doctor. He drank whiskey and gambled for pennies, was immoral in his relations with women, and as thick-skinned as he was blatant. He had been a newsboy, a contractor's clerk, and climbed up by the application of his wits. He read enormously, newspapers, cheap magazines, medical books. He had an opinion about everything, and usually worsted everyone at the graze in arguments. And he did his patients good by giving them sympathy and massage. He would have been an excellent citizen had the city not preferred to train him as a child in its reeling streets, to a sharp unscrupulousness. Una was at first disgusted by Phil Benson, then perplexed. He would address her in stately Shakespearean phrases which, as a boy, he had heard from the gallery of the Academy of Music. He would quote poetry at her. She was impressed when he almost silenced the library woman in an argument as to whether Longfellow or Whittier was the better poet, by parroting the whole of snowbound. She fancied that Phil's general Pee Weevil aspect concealed the soul of a poet. But she was shocked out of her pleasant fabbling when Phil roared at Mrs. Gray, Say, what did the baker use this pie for, a bureau or a trunk? I found three pairs of socks and a safety pin in my slab so far. Pretty Mrs. Gray was hurt and indignant, while her husband growled, ah, don't pay any attention to that human phonograph, Amy, he's got bats in his belfry. Anna had acquired a hesitating fondness for the mute gentleness of the others, and it infuriated her that this insect should spoil their picnic. But after dinner Phil Benson dallied over to her, sat on the arm of her chair, and said, I'm awful sorry that I make such a bum hit with you, Miss Golden. Oh, I can see I do all right. You're the only one here that can understand. Somehow it seems to me you aren't like other women, I know. There's something, somehow it's different, a temperament. You dream about higher things than just food and clothes. Oh, he held up a deprecating hand. Don't deny it. I'm mighty serious about it, Miss Golden. I can see it, even if you haven't waked up to it as yet. The absurd part of it was that, at least while he was talking, Mr. Phil Benson did believe what he was saying, though he had borrowed all of his sentiments from a magazine story about hobo-hemians which he had read the night before. He also spoke of reading good books, seeing good plays, and the lack of good influences in this wicked city. He didn't overdo it. He took leave in ten minutes to find good influences in a Kelly pool parlor on Third Avenue. He returned to his room at ten, and, sitting with his shoeless feet cocked up on his bed, read a story in racy yarns. While beyond the partition, about four feet from him, Oona Golden lay in bed, her smooth arms behind her aching head, and worried about Phil's lack of opportunity. She was finding in his loud impudence a twisted resemblance to Walter Babson's erratic excitability, and that won her, for love goes seeking new images of the God that is dead. Last evening Phil varied his tactics by coming to dinner early, just touching Oona's hand as she was going into the dining-room, and murmuring in a small voice. I've been thinking so much of the helpful things you said last evening, Miss Golden. Later Phil talked to her about his longing to be a great surgeon, in which he had the tremendous advantage of being almost sincere. He walked down the hall to her room, and said good night lingeringly, holding her hand. Oona went into her room, closed the door, and for full five minutes stood amazed. Why, she gasped, the little man is trying to make love to me. She laughed over the absurdity of it. Heavens! She had her ideal. The right man. He would probably be like Walter Babson, though more dependable. But whatever the nature of the Paragon, he would in every respect be just the opposite of the creature who had been saying good night to her. She sat down, tried to read the paper, tried to put Phil out of her mind, but he kept returning. She fancied that she could hear his voice in the hall. She dropped the paper to listen. I'm actually interested in him, she marveled. Oh, that's ridiculous. End of Chapter 9, Part 1