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The Job: An American Novel

by Sinclair Lewis · English · Gutenberg #25474 · 541,635 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Job: An American Novel

Author: Sinclair Lewis


        
Release date: May 15, 2008 [eBook #25474]
                Most recently updated: January 3, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE JOB: AN AMERICAN NOVEL ***




Produced by K Nordquist, Jacqueline Jeremy and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
book was produced from scanned images of public domain
material from the Google Print project.)









    THE JOB

    AN AMERICAN NOVEL

    BY
    SINCLAIR LEWIS

    AUTHOR OF MAIN STREET, BABBITT, ETC.

    GROSSET & DUNLAP
    PUBLISHERS     NEW YORK

    Made in the United States of America


    Copyright, 1917, by Harper & Brothers
    Printed in the United States of America
    Published February, 1917




    TO

    MY WIFE

    WHO HAS MADE "THE JOB" POSSIBLE AND LIFE ITSELF
    QUITE BEAUTIFULLY IMPROBABLE




    CONTENTS


                      Page

    Part I               3
    THE CITY

    Part II            133
    THE OFFICE

    Part III           251
    MAN AND WOMAN




Part I

THE CITY

CHAPTER I


Captain Lew Golden would have saved any foreign observer a great deal of
trouble in studying America. He was an almost perfect type of the petty
small-town middle-class lawyer. He lived in Panama, Pennsylvania. He had
never been "captain" of anything except the Crescent Volunteer Fire
Company, but he owned the title because he collected rents, wrote
insurance, and meddled with lawsuits.

He carried a quite visible mustache-comb and wore a collar, but no tie.
On warm days he appeared on the street in his shirt-sleeves, and
discussed the comparative temperatures of the past thirty years with
Doctor Smith and the Mansion House 'bus-driver. He never used the word
"beauty" except in reference to a setter dog--beauty of words or music,
of faith or rebellion, did not exist for him. He rather fancied large,
ambitious, banal, red-and-gold sunsets, but he merely glanced at them as
he straggled home, and remarked that they were "nice." He believed that
all Parisians, artists, millionaires, and socialists were immoral. His
entire system of theology was comprised in the Bible, which he never
read, and the Methodist Church, which he rarely attended; and he desired
no system of economics beyond the current platform of the Republican
party. He was aimlessly industrious, crotchety but kind, and almost
quixotically honest.

He believed that "Panama, Pennsylvania, was good enough for anybody."

This last opinion was not shared by his wife, nor by his daughter Una.

Mrs. Golden was one of the women who aspire just enough to be vaguely
discontented; not enough to make them toil at the acquisition of
understanding and knowledge. She had floated into a comfortable
semi-belief in a semi-Christian Science, and she read novels with a
conviction that she would have been a romantic person "if she hadn't
married Mr. Golden--not but what he's a fine man and very bright and
all, but he hasn't got much imagination or any, well, _romance_!"

She wrote poetry about spring and neighborhood births, and Captain
Golden admired it so actively that he read it aloud to callers. She
attended all the meetings of the Panama Study Club, and desired to learn
French, though she never went beyond borrowing a French grammar from the
Episcopalian rector and learning one conjugation. But in the pioneer
suffrage movement she took no part--she didn't "think it was quite
ladylike." ... She was a poor cook, and her house always smelled stuffy,
but she liked to have flowers about. She was pretty of face, frail of
body, genuinely gracious of manner. She really did like people, liked to
give cookies to the neighborhood boys, and--if you weren't impatient
with her slackness--you found her a wistful and touching figure in her
slight youthfulness and in the ambition to be a romantic personage, a
Marie Antoinette or a Mrs. Grover Cleveland, which ambition she still
retained at fifty-five.

She was, in appearance, the ideal wife and mother--sympathetic,
forgiving, bright-lipped as a May morning. She never demanded; she
merely suggested her desires, and, if they were refused, let her lips
droop in a manner which only a brute could withstand.

She plaintively admired her efficient daughter Una.

Una Golden was a "good little woman"--not pretty, not noisy, not
particularly articulate, but instinctively on the inside of things;
naturally able to size up people and affairs. She had common sense and
unkindled passion. She was a matter-of-fact idealist, with a healthy
woman's simple longing for love and life. At twenty-four Una had half a
dozen times fancied herself in love. She had been embraced at a dance,
and felt the stirring of a desire for surrender. But always a native
shrewdness had kept her from agonizing over these affairs.

She was not--and will not be--a misunderstood genius, an undeveloped
artist, an embryonic leader in feminism, nor an ugly duckling who would
put on a Georgette hat and captivate the theatrical world. She was an
untrained, ambitious, thoroughly commonplace, small-town girl. But she
was a natural executive and she secretly controlled the Golden
household; kept Captain Golden from eating with his knife, and her
mother from becoming drugged with too much reading of poppy-flavored
novels.

She wanted to learn, learn anything. But the Goldens were too
respectable to permit her to have a job, and too poor to permit her to
go to college. From the age of seventeen, when she had graduated from
the high school--in white ribbons and heavy new boots and tight new
organdy--to twenty-three, she had kept house and gone to gossip-parties
and unmethodically read books from the town library--Walter Scott,
Richard Le Gallienne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mrs. Humphry Ward, _How to
Know the Birds_, _My Year in the Holy Land_, _Home Needlework_, _Sartor
Resartus_, and _Ships that Pass in the Night_. Her residue of knowledge
from reading them was a disbelief in Panama, Pennsylvania.

She was likely never to be anything more amazing than a mother and wife,
who would entertain the Honiton Embroidery Circle twice a year.

Yet, potentially, Una Golden was as glowing as any princess of balladry.
She was waiting for the fairy prince, though he seemed likely to be
nothing more decorative than a salesman in a brown derby. She was fluid;
indeterminate as a moving cloud.

Although Una Golden had neither piquant prettiness nor grave
handsomeness, her soft littleness made people call her "Puss," and want
to cuddle her as a child cuddles a kitten. If you noted Una at all, when
you met her, you first noted her gentle face, her fine-textured hair of
faded gold, and her rimless eye-glasses with a gold chain over her ear.
These glasses made a business-like center to her face; you felt that
without them she would have been too childish. Her mouth was as kind as
her spirited eyes, but it drooped. Her body was so femininely soft that
you regarded her as rather plump. But for all her curving hips, and the
thick ankles which she considered "common," she was rather anemic. Her
cheeks were round, not rosy, but clear and soft; her lips a pale pink.
Her chin was plucky and undimpled; it was usually spotted with one or
two unimportant eruptions, which she kept so well covered with powder
that they were never noticeable. No one ever thought of them except Una
herself, to whom they were tragic blemishes which she timorously
examined in the mirror every time she went to wash her hands. She knew
that they were the result of the indigestible Golden family meals; she
tried to take comfort by noticing their prevalence among other girls;
but they kept startling her anew; she would secretly touch them with a
worried forefinger, and wonder whether men were able to see anything
else in her face.

You remembered her best as she hurried through the street in her tan
mackintosh with its yellow velveteen collar turned high up, and one of
those modest round hats to which she was addicted. For then you were
aware only of the pale-gold hair fluffing round her school-mistress
eye-glasses, her gentle air of respectability, and her undistinguished
littleness.

She trusted in the village ideal of virginal vacuousness as the type of
beauty which most captivated men, though every year she was more
shrewdly doubtful of the divine superiority of these men. That a woman's
business in life was to remain respectable and to secure a man, and
consequent security, was her unmeditated faith--till, in 1905, when Una
was twenty-four years old, her father died.


§ 2

Captain Golden left to wife and daughter a good name, a number of debts,
and eleven hundred dollars in lodge insurance. The funeral was scarcely
over before neighbors--the furniture man, the grocer, the polite old
homeopathic doctor--began to come in with bland sympathy and large
bills. When the debts were all cleared away the Goldens had only six
hundred dollars and no income beyond the good name. All right-minded
persons agree that a good name is precious beyond rubies, but Una would
have preferred less honor and more rubies.

She was so engaged in comforting her mother that she scarcely grieved
for her father. She took charge of everything--money, house, bills.

Mrs. Golden had been overwhelmed by a realization that, however slack
and shallow Captain Golden had been, he had adored her and encouraged
her in her gentility, her pawing at culture. With an emerging sincerity,
Mrs. Golden mourned him, now, missed his gossipy presence--and at the
same time she was alive to the distinction it added to her slim
gracefulness to wear black and look wan. She sobbed on Una's shoulder;
she said that she was lonely; and Una sturdily comforted her and looked
for work.

One of the most familiar human combinations in the world is that of
unemployed daughter and widowed mother. A thousand times you have seen
the jobless daughter devoting all of her curiosity, all of her youth, to
a widowed mother of small pleasantries, a small income, and a shabby
security. Thirty comes, and thirty-five. The daughter ages steadily. At
forty she is as old as her unwithering mother. Sweet she is, and
pathetically hopeful of being a pianist or a nurse; never quite
reconciled to spinsterhood, though she often laughs about it; often, by
her insistence that she is an "old maid," she makes the thought of her
barren age embarrassing to others. The mother is sweet, too, and "wants
to keep in touch with her daughter's interests," only, her daughter has
no interests. Had the daughter revolted at eighteen, had she stubbornly
insisted that mother either accompany her to parties or be content to
stay alone, had she acquired "interests," she might have meant something
in the new generation; but the time for revolt passes, however much the
daughter may long to seem young among younger women. The mother is
usually unconscious of her selfishness; she would be unspeakably
horrified if some brutal soul told her that she was a vampire. Chance,
chance and waste, rule them both, and the world passes by while the
mother has her games of cards with daughter, and deems herself
unselfish because now and then she lets daughter join a party (only to
hasten back to mother), and even "wonders why daughter doesn't take an
interest in girls her own age." That ugly couple on the porch of the
apple-sauce and wash-pitcher boarding-house--the mother a mute, dwarfish
punchinello, and the daughter a drab woman of forty with a mole, a wart,
a silence. That charming mother of white hair and real lace with the
well-groomed daughter. That comfortable mother at home and daughter in
an office, but with no suitors, no ambition beyond the one at home. They
are all examples of the mother-and-daughter phenomenon, that most
touching, most destructive example of selfless unselfishness, which robs
all the generations to come, because mother has never been trained to
endure the long, long thoughts of solitude; because she sees nothing by
herself, and within herself hears no diverting voice....

There were many such mothers and daughters in Panama. If they were
wealthy, daughter collected rents and saw lawyers and belonged to a club
and tried to keep youthful at parties. If middle-class, daughter taught
school, almost invariably. If poor, mother did the washing and daughter
collected it. So it was marked down for Una that she should be a
teacher.

Not that she wanted to be a teacher! After graduating from high school,
she had spent two miserable terms of teaching in the small white
district school, four miles out on the Bethlehem Road. She hated the
drive out and back, the airless room and the foul outbuildings, the shy,
stupid, staring children, the jolly little arithmetical problems about
wall-paper, piles of lumber, the amount of time that notoriously
inefficient workmen will take to do "a certain piece of work." Una was
honest enough to know that she was not an honest teacher, that she
neither loved masses of other people's children nor had any ideals of
developing the new generation. But she had to make money. Of course she
would teach!

When she talked over affairs with her tearful mother, Mrs. Golden always
ended by suggesting, "I wonder if perhaps you couldn't go back to
school-teaching again. Everybody said you were so successful. And maybe
I could get some needlework to do. I do want to help so much."

Mrs. Golden did, apparently, really want to help. But she never
suggested anything besides teaching, and she went on recklessly
investing in the nicest mourning. Meantime Una tried to find other work
in Panama.

Seen from a balloon, Panama is merely a mole on the long hill-slopes.
But to Una its few straggly streets were a whole cosmos. She knew
somebody in every single house. She knew just where the succotash, the
cake-boxes, the clothes-lines, were kept in each of the grocery-stores,
and on market Saturdays she could wait on herself. She summed up the
whole town and its possibilities; and she wondered what opportunities
the world out beyond Panama had for her. She recalled two trips to
Philadelphia and one to Harrisburg. She made out a list of openings with
such methodical exactness as she devoted to keeping the dwindling lodge
insurance from disappearing altogether. Hers was no poetic outreach like
that of the young genius who wants to be off for Bohemia. It was a
question of earning money in the least tedious way. Una was facing the
feminist problem, without knowing what the word "feminist" meant.

This was her list of fair fields of fruitful labor:

She could--and probably would--teach in some hen-coop of pedagogy.

She could marry, but no one seemed to want her, except old Henry
Carson, the widower, with catarrh and three children, who called on her
and her mother once in two weeks, and would propose whenever she
encouraged him to. This she knew scientifically. She had only to sit
beside him on the sofa, let her hand drop down beside his. But she
positively and ungratefully didn't want to marry Henry and listen to his
hawking and his grumbling for the rest of her life. Sooner or later one
of The Boys might propose. But in a small town it was all a gamble.
There weren't so very many desirable young men--most of the energetic
ones went off to Philadelphia and New York. True that Jennie McTevish
had been married at thirty-one, when everybody had thought she was
hopelessly an old maid. Yet here was Birdie Mayberry unmarried at
thirty-four, no one could ever understand why, for she had been the
prettiest and jolliest girl in town. Una crossed blessed matrimony off
the list as a commercial prospect.

She could go off and study music, law, medicine, elocution, or any of
that amazing hodge-podge of pursuits which are permitted to small-town
women. But she really couldn't afford to do any of these; and, besides,
she had no talent for music of a higher grade than Sousa and Victor
Herbert; she was afraid of lawyers; blood made her sick; and her voice
was too quiet for the noble art of elocution as practised by several
satin-waisted, semi-artistic ladies who "gave readings" of _Enoch Arden_
and _Evangeline_ before the Panama Study Circle and the Panama Annual
Chautauqua.

She could have a job selling dry-goods behind the counter in the Hub
Store, but that meant loss of caste.

She could teach dancing--but she couldn't dance particularly well. And
that was all that she could do.

She had tried to find work as office-woman for Dr. Mayberry, the
dentist; in the office of the Panama Wood-Turning Company; in the
post-office; as lofty enthroned cashier for the Hub Store; painting
place-cards and making "fancy-work" for the Art Needlework Exchange.

The job behind the counter in the Hub Store was the only one offered
her.

"If I were only a boy," sighed Una, "I could go to work in the
hardware-store or on the railroad or anywhere, and not lose
respectability. Oh, I _hate_ being a woman."


§ 3

Una had been trying to persuade her father's old-time rival, Squire
Updegraff, the real-estate and insurance man, that her experience with
Captain Golden would make her a perfect treasure in the office. Squire
Updegraff had leaped up at her entrance, and blared, "Well, well, and
how is the little girl making it?" He had set out a chair for her and
held her hand. But he knew that her only experience with her father's
affairs had been an effort to balance Captain Golden's account-books,
which were works of genius in so far as they were composed according to
the inspirational method. So there was nothing very serious in their
elaborate discussion of giving Una a job.

It was her last hope in Panama. She went disconsolately down the short
street, between the two-story buildings and the rows of hitched
lumber-wagons. Nellie Page, the town belle, tripping by in canvas
sneakers and a large red hair-ribbon, shouted at her, and Charlie
Martindale, of the First National Bank, nodded to her, but these
exquisites were too young for her; they danced too well and laughed too
easily. The person who stopped her for a long curbstone conference about
the weather, while most of the town observed and gossiped, was the
fateful Henry Carson. The village sun was unusually blank and hard on
Henry's bald spot to-day. _Heavens!_ she cried to herself, in almost
hysterical protest, would she have to marry Henry?

Miss Mattie Pugh drove by, returning from district school. Miss Mattie
had taught at Clark's Crossing for seventeen years, had grown meek and
meager and hopeless. _Heavens!_ thought Una, would she have to be shut
into the fetid barn of a small school unless she married Henry?

"I _won't_ be genteel! I'll work in The Hub or any place first!" Una
declared. While she trudged home--a pleasant, inconspicuous,
fluffy-haired young woman, undramatic as a field daisy--a cataract of
protest poured through her. All the rest of her life she would have to
meet that doddering old Mr. Mosely, who was unavoidably bearing down on
her now, and be held by him in long, meaningless talks. And there was
nothing amusing to do! She was so frightfully bored. She suddenly hated
the town, hated every evening she would have to spend there, reading
newspapers and playing cards with her mother, and dreading a call from
Mr. Henry Carson.

She wanted--wanted some one to love, to talk with. Why had she
discouraged the beautiful Charlie Martindale, the time he had tried to
kiss her at a dance? Charlie was fatuous, but he was young, and she
wanted, yes, yes! that was it, she wanted youth, she who was herself so
young. And she would grow old here unless some one, one of these godlike
young men, condescended to recognize her. Grow old among these streets
like piles of lumber.

She charged into the small, white, ambling Golden house, with its
peculiar smell of stale lamb gravy, and on the old broken couch--where
her father had snored all through every bright Sunday afternoon--she
sobbed feebly.

She raised her head to consider a noise overhead--the faint, domestic
thunder of a sewing-machine shaking the walls with its rhythm. The
machine stopped. She heard the noise of scissors dropped on the
floor--the most stuffily domestic sound in the world. The airless house
was crushing her. She sprang up--and then she sat down again. There was
no place to which she could flee. Henry Carson and the district school
were menacing her. And meantime she had to find out what her mother was
sewing--whether she had again been wasting money in buying mourning.

"Poor, poor little mother, working away happy up there, and I've got to
go and scold you," Una agonized. "Oh, I want to earn money, I want to
earn real money for you."

She saw a quadrangle of white on the table, behind a book. She pounced
on it. It was a letter from Mrs. Sessions, and Una scratched it open
excitedly.

Mr. and Mrs. Albert Sessions, of Panama, had gone to New York. Mr.
Sessions was in machinery. They liked New York. They lived in a flat and
went to theaters. Mrs. Sessions was a pillowy soul whom Una trusted.

"Why don't you," wrote Mrs. Sessions, "if you don't find the kind of
work you want in Panama, think about coming up to New York and taking
stenography? There are lots of chances here for secretaries, etc."

Una carefully laid down the letter. She went over and straightened her
mother's red wool slippers. She wanted to postpone for an exquisite
throbbing moment the joy of announcing to herself that she had made a
decision.

She _would_ go to New York, become a stenographer, a secretary to a
corporation president, a rich woman, free, responsible.

The fact of making this revolutionary decision so quickly gave her a
feeling of power, of already being a business woman.

She galloped up-stairs to the room where her mother was driving the
sewing-machine.

"Mumsie!" she cried, "we're going to New York! I'm going to learn to be
a business woman, and the little mother will be all dressed in satin and
silks, and dine on what-is-it and peaches and cream--the poem don't come
out right, but, oh, my little mother, we're going out adventuring, we
are!"

She plunged down beside her mother, burrowed her head in her mother's
lap, kissed that hand whose skin was like thinnest wrinkly tissue-paper.

"Why, my little daughter, what is it? Has some one sent for us? Is it
the letter from Emma Sessions? What did she say in it?"

"She suggested it, but we are going up independent."

"But can we afford to?... I would like the draymas and art-galleries and
all!"

"We _will_ afford to! We'll gamble, for once!"




CHAPTER II


Una Golden had never realized how ugly and petty were the streets of
Panama till that evening when she walked down for the mail, spurning the
very dust on the sidewalks--and there was plenty to spurn. An old
mansion of towers and scalloped shingles, broken-shuttered now and
unpainted, with a row of brick stores marching up on its once leisurely
lawn. The town-hall, a square wooden barn with a sagging upper porch,
from which the mayor would presumably have made proclamations, had there
ever been anything in Panama to proclaim about. Staring loafers in front
of the Girard House. To Una there was no romance in the sick mansion, no
kindly democracy in the village street, no bare freedom in the hills
beyond. She was not much to blame; she was a creature of action to whom
this constricted town had denied all action except sweeping.

She felt so strong now--she had expected a struggle in persuading her
mother to go to New York, but acquiescence had been easy. Una had an
exultant joy, a little youthful and cruel, in meeting old Henry Carson
and telling him that she was going away, that she "didn't know for how
long; maybe for always." So hopelessly did he stroke his lean brown
neck, which was never quite clean-shaven, that she tried to be kind to
him. She promised to write. But she felt, when she had left him, as
though she had just been released from prison. To live with him, to give
him the right to claw at her with those desiccated hands--she imagined
it with a vividness which shocked her, all the while she was listening
to his halting regrets.

A dry, dusty September wind whirled down the village street. It choked
her.

There would be no dusty winds in New York, but only mellow breezes over
marble palaces of efficient business. No Henry Carsons, but slim, alert
business men, young of eye and light of tongue.


§ 2

Una Golden had expected to thrill to her first sight of the New York
sky-line, crossing on the ferry in mid-afternoon, but it was so much
like all the post-card views of it, so stolidly devoid of any surprises,
that she merely remarked, "Oh yes, there it is, that's where I'll be,"
and turned to tuck her mother into a ferry seat and count the suit-cases
and assure her that there was no danger of pickpockets. Though, as the
ferry sidled along the land, passed an English liner, and came close
enough to the shore so that she could see the people who actually lived
in the state of blessedness called New York, Una suddenly hugged her
mother and cried, "Oh, little mother, we're going to live here and do
things together--everything."

The familiar faces of Mr. and Mrs. Albert Sessions were awaiting them at
the end of the long cavernous walk from the ferry-boat, and New York
immediately became a blur of cabs, cobblestones, bales of cotton, long
vistas of very dirty streets, high buildings, surface cars, elevateds,
shop windows that seemed dark and foreign, and everywhere such a rush of
people as made her feel insecure, cling to the Sessionses, and try to
ward off the dizziness of the swirl of new impressions. She was daunted
for a moment, but she rejoiced in the conviction that she was going to
like this madness of multiform energy.

The Sessionses lived in a flat on Amsterdam Avenue near Ninety-sixth
Street. They all went up from Cortlandt Street in the Subway, which was
still new and miraculous in 1905. For five minutes Una was terrified by
the jam of people, the blind roar through tunneled darkness, the sense
of being powerlessly hurled forward in a mass of ungovernable steel. But
nothing particularly fatal happened; and she grew proud to be part of
this black energy, and contentedly swung by a strap.

When they reached the Sessionses' flat and fell upon the gossip of
Panama, Pennsylvania, Una was absent-minded--except when the Sessionses
teased her about Henry Carson and Charlie Martindale. The rest of the
time, curled up on a black-walnut couch which she had known for years in
Panama, and which looked plaintively rustic here in New York, Una gave
herself up to impressions of the city: the voices of many children down
on Amsterdam Avenue, the shriek of a flat-wheeled surface car, the
sturdy pound of trucks, horns of automobiles; the separate sounds
scarcely distinguishable in a whirr which seemed visible as a thick,
gray-yellow dust-cloud.

Her mother went to lie down; the Sessionses (after an elaborate
explanation of why they did not keep a maid) began to get dinner, and
Una stole out to see New York by herself.

It all seemed different, at once more real and not so jumbled together,
now that she used her own eyes instead of the guidance of that knowing
old city bird, Mr. Albert Sessions.

Amsterdam Avenue was, even in the dusk of early autumn, disappointing in
its walls of yellow flat-buildings cluttered with fire-escapes, the
first stories all devoted to the same sort of shops over and over
again--delicatessens, laundries, barber-shops, saloons, groceries,
lunch-rooms. She ventured down a side-street, toward a furnace-glow of
sunset. West End Avenue was imposing to her in its solid brick and
graystone houses, and pavements milky in the waning light. Then came a
block of expensive apartments. She was finding the city of golden
rewards. Frivolous curtains hung at windows; in a huge apartment-house
hall she glimpsed a negro attendant in a green uniform with a monkey-cap
and close-set rows of brass buttons; she had a hint of palms--or what
looked like palms; of marble and mahogany and tiling, and a flash of
people in evening dress. In her plain, "sensible" suit Una tramped past.
She was unenvious, because she was going to have all these things soon.

Out of a rather stodgy vision of silk opera wraps and suitors who were
like floor-walkers, she came suddenly out on Riverside Drive and the
splendor of the city.

A dull city of straight-front unvaried streets is New York. But she
aspires in her sky-scrapers; she dreams a garden dream of Georgian days
in Gramercy Park; and on Riverside Drive she bares her exquisite breast
and wantons in beauty. Here she is sophisticated, yet eager, comparable
to Paris and Vienna; and here Una exulted.

Down a polished roadway that reflected every light rolled smart motors,
with gay people in the sort of clothes she had studied in
advertisements. The driveway was bordered with mist wreathing among the
shrubs. Above Una shouldered the tremendous façades of gold-corniced
apartment-houses. Across the imperial Hudson everything was enchanted by
the long, smoky afterglow, against which the silhouettes of dome and
tower and factory chimney stood out like an Orient city.

"Oh, I want all this--it's mine!... An apartment up there--a big, broad
window-seat, and look out on all this. Oh, dear God," she was
unconsciously praying to her vague Panama Wesley Methodist Church God,
who gave you things if you were good, "I will work for all this.... And
for the little mother, dear mother that's never had a chance."

In the step of the slightly stolid girl there was a new lightness, a new
ecstasy in walking rapidly through the stirring New York air, as she
turned back to the Sessionses' flat.


§ 3

Later, when the streets fell into order and became normal, Una could
never quite identify the vaudeville theater to which the Sessionses took
them that evening. The gold-and-ivory walls of the lobby seemed to rise
immeasurably to a ceiling flashing with frescoes of light lovers in blue
and fluffy white, mincing steps and ardent kisses and flaunting
draperies. They climbed a tremendous arching stairway of marble, upon
which her low shoes clattered with a pleasant sound. They passed niches
hung with heavy curtains of plum-colored velvet, framing the sly peep of
plaster fauns, and came out on a balcony stretching as wide as the sea
at twilight, looking down on thousands of people in the orchestra below,
up at a vast golden dome lighted by glowing spheres hung with diamonds,
forward at a towering proscenic arch above which slim, nude goddesses in
bas-relief floated in a languor which obsessed her, set free the bare
brown laughing nymph that hides in every stiff Una in semi-mourning.

Nothing so diverting as that program has ever been witnessed. The funny
men with their solemn mock-battles, their extravagance in dress, their
galloping wit, made her laugh till she wanted them to stop. The singers
were bell-voiced; the dancers graceful as clouds, and just touched with
a beguiling naughtiness; and in the playlet there was a chill intensity
that made her shudder when the husband accused the wife whom he
suspected, oh, so absurdly, as Una indignantly assured herself.

The entertainment was pure magic, untouched by human clumsiness, rare
and spellbound as a stilly afternoon in oak woods by a lake.

They went to a marvelous café, and Mr. Sessions astounded them by the
urbanity with which he hurried captains and waiters and 'bus-boys, and
ordered lobster and coffee, and pretended that he was going to be wicked
and have wine and cigarettes.

Months afterward, when she was going to vaudeville by herself, Una tried
to identify the theater of wizardry, but she never could. The Sessionses
couldn't remember which theater it was; they thought it was the Pitt,
but surely they must have been mistaken, for the Pitt was a shanty
daubed with grotesque nudes, rambling and pretentious, with shockingly
amateurish programs. And afterward, on the occasion or two when they
went out to dinner with the Sessionses, it seemed to Una that Mr.
Sessions was provincial in restaurants, too deprecatingly friendly with
the waiters, too hesitating about choosing dinner.


§ 4

Whiteside and Schleusner's College of Commerce, where Una learned the
art of business, occupied only five shabby rooms of crepuscular windows
and perpetually dusty corners, and hard, glistening wall-paint, in a
converted (but not sanctified) old dwelling-house on West Eighteenth
Street. The faculty were six: Mr. Whiteside, an elaborate pomposity who
smoothed his concrete brow as though he had a headache, and took
obvious pride in being able to draw birds with Spencerian strokes. Mr.
Schleusner, who was small and vulgar and _déclassé_ and really knew
something about business. A shabby man like a broken-down bookkeeper,
silent and diligent and afraid. A towering man with a red face, who kept
licking his lips with a small red triangle of tongue, and taught
English--commercial college English--in a bombastic voice of finicky
correctness, and always smelled of cigar smoke. An active young Jewish
New-Yorker of wonderful black hair, elfin face, tilted hat, and smart
clothes, who did something on the side in real estate. Finally, a thin
widow, who was so busy and matter-of-fact that she was no more
individualized than a street-car. Any one of them was considered
competent to teach any "line," and among them they ground out
instruction in shorthand, typewriting, book-keeping, English grammar,
spelling, composition (with a special view to the construction of
deceptive epistles), and commercial geography. Once or twice a week,
language-masters from a linguistic mill down the street were had in to
chatter the more vulgar phrases of French, German, and Spanish.

A cluttered, wheezy omnibus of a school, but in it Una rode to spacious
and beautiful hours of learning. It was even more to her than is the
art-school to the yearner who has always believed that she has a talent
for painting; for the yearner has, even as a child, been able to draw
and daub and revel in the results; while for Una this was the first time
in her life when her labor seemed to count for something. Her
school-teaching had been a mere time-filler. Now she was at once the
responsible head of the house and a seer of the future.

Most of the girls in the school learned nothing but shorthand and
typewriting, but to these Una added English grammar, spelling, and
letter-composition. After breakfast at the little flat which she had
taken with her mother, she fled to the school. She drove into her books,
she delighted in the pleasure of her weary teachers when she snapped out
a quick answer to questions, or typed a page correctly, or was able to
remember the shorthand symbol for a difficult word like "psychologize."

Her belief in the sacredness of the game was boundless.




CHAPTER III


Except for the young man in the bank, the new young man in the
hardware-store, and the proprietors of the new Broadway Clothing Shop,
Una had known most of the gallants in Panama, Pennsylvania, from
knickerbocker days; she remembered their bony, boyish knees and their
school-day whippings too well to be romantic about them. But in the
commercial college she was suddenly associated with seventy entirely new
and interesting males. So brief were the courses, so irregular the
classifications, that there was no spirit of seniority to keep her out
of things; and Una, with her fever of learning, her instinctive common
sense about doing things in the easiest way, stood out among the girl
students. The young men did not buzz about her as they did about the
slim, diabolic, star-eyed girl from Brooklyn, in her tempting low-cut
blouses, or the intense, curly-headed, boyish, brown Jew girl, or the
ardent dancers and gigglers. But Una's self-sufficient eagerness gave a
fervor to her blue eyes, and a tilt to her commonplace chin, which made
her almost pretty, and the young men liked to consult her about things.
She was really more prominent here, in a school of one hundred and
seventy, than in her Panama high school with its enrolment of seventy.

Panama, Pennsylvania, had never regarded Una as a particularly capable
young woman. Dozens of others were more masterful at trimming the
Christmas tree for Wesley Methodist Church, preparing for the annual
picnic of the Art Needlework Coterie, arranging a surprise donation
party for the Methodist pastor, even spring house-cleaning. But she had
been well spoken of as a marketer, a cook, a neighbor who would take
care of your baby while you went visiting--because these tasks had
seemed worth while to her. She was more practical than either Panama or
herself believed. All these years she had, without knowing that she was
philosophizing, without knowing that there was a world-wide inquiry into
woman's place, been trying to find work that needed her. Her father's
death had freed her; had permitted her to toil for her mother, cherish
her, be regarded as useful. Instantly--still without learning that there
was such a principle as feminism--she had become a feminist, demanding
the world and all the fullness thereof as her field of labor.

And now, in this fumbling school, she was beginning to feel the theory
of efficiency, the ideal of Big Business.

For "business," that one necessary field of activity to which the
egotistic arts and sciences and theologies and military puerilities are
but servants, that long-despised and always valiant effort to unify the
labor of the world, is at last beginning to be something more than dirty
smithing. No longer does the business man thank the better classes for
permitting him to make and distribute bread and motor-cars and books. No
longer does he crawl to the church to buy pardon for usury. Business is
being recognized--and is recognizing itself--as ruler of the world.

With this consciousness of power it is reforming its old, petty,
half-hearted ways; its idea of manufacture as a filthy sort of
tinkering; of distribution as chance peddling and squalid shopkeeping;
it is feverishly seeking efficiency.... In its machinery.... But, like
all monarchies, it must fail unless it becomes noble of heart. So long
as capital and labor are divided, so long as the making of munitions or
injurious food is regarded as business, so long as Big Business believes
that it exists merely to enrich a few of the lucky or the well born or
the nervously active, it will not be efficient, but deficient. But the
vision of an efficiency so broad that it can be kindly and sure, is
growing--is discernible at once in the scientific business man and the
courageous labor-unionist.

That vision Una Golden feebly comprehended. Where she first beheld it
cannot be said. Certainly not in the lectures of her teachers, humorless
and unvisioned grinds, who droned that by divine edict letters must end
with a "yours truly" one space to the left of the middle of the page;
who sniffed at card-ledgers as new-fangled nonsense, and, at their most
inspired, croaked out such platitudes as: "Look out for the pennies and
the pounds will look out for themselves," or "The man who fails is the
man who watches the clock."

Nor was the vision of the inspired Big Business that shall be, to be
found in the books over which Una labored--the flat, maroon-covered,
dusty, commercial geography, the arid book of phrases and
rules-of-the-thumb called "Fish's Commercial English," the manual of
touch-typewriting, or the shorthand primer that, with its grotesque
symbols and numbered exercises and yellow pages dog-eared by many
owners, looked like an old-fashioned Arabic grammar headachily perused
in some divinity-school library.

Her vision of it all must have come partly from the eager talk of a few
of the students--the girl who wasn't ever going to give up her job, even
if she did marry; the man who saw a future in these motion pictures;
the shaggy-haired zealot who talked about profit-sharing (which was a
bold radicalism back in 1905; almost as subversive of office discipline
as believing in unions). Partly it came from the new sorts of business
magazines for the man who didn't, like his fathers, insist, "I guess I
can run my business without any outside interference," but sought
everywhere for systems and charts and new markets and the scientific
mind.


§ 2

While her power of faith and vision was satisfied by the largeness of
the city and by her chance to work, there was quickening in Una a shy,
indefinable, inner life of tenderness and desire for love. She did not
admit it, but she observed the young men about her with an interest that
was as diverting as her ambition.

At first they awed her by their number and their strangeness. But when
she seemed to be quite their equal in this school of the timorously
clerical, she began to look at them level-eyed.... A busy, commonplace,
soft-armed, pleasant, good little thing she was; glancing at them
through eye-glasses attached to a gold chain over her ear, not much
impressed now, slightly ashamed by the delight she took in winning their
attention by brilliant recitations.... She decided that most of them
were earnest-minded but intelligent serfs, not much stronger than the
girls who were taking stenography for want of anything better to do.
They sprawled and looked vacuous as they worked in rows in the big
study-hall, with its hard blue walls showing the marks of two removed
partitions, its old iron fireplace stuffed with rubbers and overshoes
and crayon-boxes. As a provincial, Una disliked the many Jews among
them, and put down their fervor for any sort of learning to
acquisitiveness. The rest she came to despise for the clumsy slowness
with which they learned even the simplest lessons. And to all of them
she--who was going to be rich and powerful, directly she was good for
one hundred words a minute at stenography!--felt disdainfully superior,
because they were likely to be poor the rest of their lives.

In a twilight walk on Washington Heights, a walk of such vigor and happy
absorption with new problems as she had never known in Panama, she
caught herself being contemptuous about their frayed poverty. With a
sharp emotional sincerity, she rebuked herself for such sordidness,
mocked herself for assuming that she was already rich.

Even out of this mass of clerklings emerged two or three who were
interesting: Sam Weintraub, a young, active, red-headed, slim-waisted
Jew, who was born in Brooklyn. He smoked large cigars with an air, knew
how to wear his clothes, and told about playing tennis at the Prospect
Athletic Club. He would be a smart secretary or confidential clerk some
day, Una was certain; he would own a car and be seen in evening clothes
and even larger cigars at after-theater suppers. She was rather in awe
of his sophistication. He was the only man who made her feel like a
Freshman.

J. J. Todd, a reticent, hesitating, hard-working man of thirty, from
Chatham on Cape Cod. It was he who, in noon-time arguments, grimly
advocated profit-sharing, which Sam Weintraub debonairly dismissed as
"socialistic."

And, most appealing to her, enthusiastic young Sanford Hunt,
inarticulate, but longing for a chance to attach himself to some master.
Weintraub and Todd had desks on either side of her; they had that great
romantic virtue, propinquity. But Sanford Hunt she had noticed, in his
corner across the room, because he glanced about with such boyish
loneliness.

Sanford Hunt helped her find a rubber in the high-school-like coat-room
on a rainy day when the girls were giggling and the tremendous swells of
the institution were whooping and slapping one another on the back and
acting as much as possible like their ideal of college men--an ideal
presumably derived from motion pictures and college playlets in
vaudeville. Una saw J. J. Todd gawping at her, but not offering to help,
while a foreshortened Sanford groped along the floor, under the dusty
line of coats, for her missing left rubber. Sanford came up with the
rubber, smiled like a nice boy, and walked with her to the Subway.

He didn't need much encouragement to tell his ambitions. He was
twenty-one--three years younger than herself. He was a semi-orphan, born
in Newark; had worked up from office-boy to clerk in the office of a
huge Jersey City paint company; had saved money to take a commercial
course; was going back to the paint company, and hoped to be
office-manager there. He had a conviction that "the finest man in the
world" was Mr. Claude Lowry, president of the Lowry Paint Company; the
next finest, Mr. Ernest Lowry, vice-president and general manager; the
next, Mr. Julius Schwirtz, one of the two city salesmen--Mr. Schwirtz
having occupied a desk next to his own for two years--and that "_the_
best paint on the market to-day is Lowry's Lasting Paint--simply no
getting around it."

In the five-minute walk over to the Eighteenth Street station of the
Subway, Sanford had lastingly impressed Una by his devotion to the job;
eager and faithful as the glory that a young subaltern takes in his
regiment. She agreed with him that the dour J. J. Todd was "crazy" in
his theories about profit-sharing and selling stocks to employees. While
she was with young Sanford, Una found herself concurring that "the
bosses know so much better about all those things--gee whiz! they've had
so much more experience--besides you can't expect them to give away all
their profits to please these walking delegates or a Cape Cod farmer
like Todd! All these theories don't do a fellow any good; what he wants
is to stick on a job and make good."

Though, in keeping with the general school-boyishness of the
institution, the study-room supervisors tried to prevent conversation,
there was always a current of whispering and low talk, and Sam Weintraub
gave Una daily reports of the tennis, the dances, the dinners at the
Prospect Athletic Club. Her evident awe of his urban amusements pleased
him. He told his former idol, the slim, blond giggler, that she was
altogether too fresh for a Bronx Kid, and he basked in Una's admiration.
Through him she had a revelation of the New York in which people
actually were born, which they took casually, as she did Panama.

She tried consciously to become a real New-Yorker herself. After
lunch--her home-made lunch of sandwiches and an apple--which she ate in
the buzzing, gossiping study-hall at noon-hour, she explored the city.
Sometimes Sanford Hunt begged to go with her. Once Todd stalked along
and embarrassed her by being indignant over an anti-socialist orator in
Madison Square. Once, on Fifth Avenue, she met Sam Weintraub, and he
nonchalantly pointed out, in a passing motor, a man whom he declared to
be John D. Rockefeller.

Even at lunch-hour Una could not come to much understanding with the
girls of the commercial college. They seemed alternately third-rate
stenographers, and very haughty urbanites who knew all about "fellows"
and "shows" and "glad rags." Except for good-natured, square-rigged Miss
Moynihan, and the oldish, anxious, industrious Miss Ingalls, who, like
Una, came from a small town, and the adorably pretty little Miss Moore,
whom you couldn't help loving, Una saw the girls of the school only in a
mass.

It was Sam Weintraub, J. J. Todd, and Sanford Hunt whom Una watched and
liked, and of whom she thought when the school authorities pompously
invited them all to a dance early in November.


§ 3

The excitement, the giggles, the discussions of girdles and slippers and
hair-waving and men, which filled the study-hall at noon and the
coat-room at closing hour, was like midnight silence compared with the
tumult in Una's breast when she tried to make herself believe that
either her blue satin evening dress or her white-and-pink frock of
"novelty crêpe" was attractive enough for the occasion. The crêpe was
the older, but she had worn the blue satin so much that now the crêpe
suddenly seemed the newer, the less soiled. After discussions with her
mother, which involved much holding up of the crêpe and the tracing of
imaginary diagrams with a forefinger, she decided to put a new velvet
girdle and new sleeve ruffles on the crêpe, and then she said, "It will
have to do."

Very different is the dressing of the girl who isn't quite pretty, nor
at all rich, from the luxurious joy which the beautiful woman takes in
her new toilettes. Instead of the faint, shivery wonder as to whether
men will realize how exquisitely the line of a new bodice accentuates
the molding of her neck, the unpretty girl hopes that no one will
observe how unevenly her dress hangs, how pointed and red and rough are
her elbows, how clumsily waved her hair. "I don't think anybody will
notice," she sighs, and is contemptuously conscious of her own stolid,
straight, healthy waist, while her mother flutters about and pretends to
believe that she is curved like a houri, like Helen of Troy, like Isolde
at eighteen.

Una was touched by her mother's sincere eagerness in trying to make her
pretty. Poor little mother. It had been hard on her to sit alone all day
in a city flat, with no Panama neighbors to drop in on her, no meeting
of the Panama Study Club, and with Una bringing home her books to work
aloof all evening.

The day before the dance, J. J. Todd dourly asked her if he might call
for her and take her home. Una accepted hesitatingly. As she did so, she
unconsciously glanced at the decorative Sam Weintraub, who was rocking
on his toes and flirting with Miss Moore, the kittenish belle of the
school.

She must have worried for fifteen minutes over the question of whether
she was going to wear a hat or a scarf, trying to remember the best
social precedents of Panama as laid down by Mrs. Dr. Smith, trying to
recall New York women as she had once or twice seen them in the evening
on Broadway. Finally, she jerked a pale-blue chiffon scarf over her
mildly pretty hair, pulled on her new long, white kid gloves, noted
miserably that the gloves did not quite cover her pebbly elbows, and
snapped at her fussing mother: "Oh, it doesn't matter. I'm a perfect
sight, anyway, so what's the use of worrying!"

Her mother looked so hurt and bewildered that Una pulled her down into a
chair, and, kneeling on the floor with her arms about her, crooned, "Oh,
I'm just nervous, mumsie dear; working so hard and all. I'll have the
best time, now you've made me so pretty for the dance." Clasped thus, an
intense brooding affection holding them and seeming to fill the shabby
sitting-room, they waited for the coming of her Tristan, her chevalier,
the flat-footed J. J. Todd.

They heard Todd shamble along the hall. They wriggled with concealed
laughter and held each other tighter when he stopped at the door of the
flat and blew his nervous nose in a tremendous blast.... More vulgar
possibly than the trumpetry which heralded the arrival of Lancelot at a
château, but on the whole quite as effective.

She set out with him, observing his pitiful, home-cleaned, black
sack-suit, and home-shined, expansive, black boots and ready-made tie,
while he talked easily, and was merely rude about dances and clothes and
the weather.

In the study-hall, which had been cleared of all seats except for a
fringe along the walls, and was unevenly hung with school flags and
patriotic bunting, Una found the empty-headed time-servers, the Little
Folk, to whom she was so superior in the class-room. Brooklyn Jews used
to side-street dance-halls, Bronx girls who went to the bartenders'
ball, and the dinner and grand ball of the Clamchowder Twenty, they
laughed and talked and danced--all three at once--with an ease which
dismayed her.

To Una Golden, of Panama, the waltz and the two-step were solemn
affairs. She could make her feet go in a one-two-three triangle with
approximate accuracy, if she didn't take any liberties with them. She
was relieved to find that Todd danced with a heavy accuracy which kept
her from stumbling.... But their performance was solemn and joyless,
while by her skipped Sam Weintraub, in evening clothes with black velvet
collar and cuffs, swinging and making fantastic dips with the lovely
Miss Moore, who cuddled into his arms and swayed to his swing.

"Let's cut out the next," said Todd, and she consented, though Sanford
Hunt came boyishly, blushingly up to ask her for a dance.... She was
intensely aware that she was a wall-flower, in a row with the anxious
Miss Ingalls and the elderly frump, Miss Fisle. Sam Weintraub seemed to
avoid her, and, though she tried to persuade herself that his greasy,
curly, red hair and his pride of evening clothes and sharp face were
blatantly Jewish, she knew that she admired his atmosphere of
gorgeousness and was in despair at being shut out of it. She even feared
that Sanford Hunt hadn't really wanted to dance with her, and she
wilfully ignored his frequent glances of friendliness and his efforts to
introduce her and his "lady friend." She was silent and hard, while poor
Todd, trying not to be a radical and lecture on single-tax or municipal
ownership, attempted to be airy about the theater, which meant the one
show he had seen since he had come to New York.

From vague dissatisfaction she drifted into an active resentment at
being shut out of the world of pretty things, of clinging gowns and
graceful movement and fragrant rooms. While Todd was taking her home she
was saying to herself over and over, "Nope; it's just as bad as parties
at Panama. Never really enjoyed 'em. I'm out of it. I'll stick to my
work. Oh, drat it!"


§ 4

Blindly, in a daily growing faith in her commercial future, she shut out
the awkward gaieties of the school, ignored Todd and Sanford Hunt and
Sam Weintraub, made no effort to cultivate the adorable Miss Moore's
rather flattering friendliness for her. She was like a girl grind in a
coeducational college who determines to head the class and to that
devotes all of a sexless energy.

Only Una was not sexless. Though she hadn't the dancing-girl's oblivious
delight in pleasure, though her energetic common sense and willingness
to serve had turned into a durable plodding, Una was alive, normal,
desirous of love, as the flower-faced girl grind of the college so often
is not, to the vast confusion of numerous ardent young gentlemen.

She could not long forbid herself an interest in Sanford Hunt and Sam
Weintraub; she even idealized Todd as a humble hero, a self-made and
honest man, which he was, though Una considered herself highly
charitable to him.

Sweet to her--even when he told her that he was engaged, even when it
was evident that he regarded her as an older sister or as a very young
and understanding aunt--was Sanford Hunt's liking. "Why do you like
me--if you do?" she demanded one lunch-hour, when he had brought her a
bar of milk-chocolate.

"Oh, I dun'no'; you're so darn honest, and you got so much more sense
than this bunch of Bronx totties. Gee! they'll make bum stenogs. I know.
I've worked in an office. They'll keep their gum and a looking-glass in
the upper right-hand drawer of their typewriter desks, and the old man
will call them down eleventy times a day, and they'll marry the
shipping-clerk first time he sneaks out from behind a box. But you got
sense, and somehow--gee! I never know how to express things--glad I'm
taking this English composition stuff--oh, you just seem to understand a
guy. I never liked that Yid Weintraub till you made me see how darn
clever and nice he really is, even if he does wear spats."

Sanford told her often that he wished she was going to come over to the
Lowry Paint Company to work, when she finished. He had entered the
college before her; he would be through somewhat earlier; he was going
back to the paint company and would try to find an opening for her
there. He wanted her to meet Mr. Julius Edward Schwirtz, the Manhattan
salesman of the company.

When Mr. Schwirtz was in that part of town, interviewing the
department-store buyers, he called up Sanford Hunt, and Sanford insisted
that she come out to lunch with Schwirtz and himself and his girl. She
went shyly.

Sanford's sweetheart proved to be as clean and sweet as himself, but
mute, smiling instead of speaking, inclined to admire every one, without
much discrimination. Sanford was very proud, very eager as host, and his
boyish admiration of all his guests gave a certain charm to the corner
of the crude German sausage-and-schnitzel restaurant where they lunched.
Una worked at making the party as successful as possible, and was
cordial to Mr. Julius Edward Schwirtz, the paint salesman.

Mr. Schwirtz was forty or forty-one, a red-faced, clipped-mustached,
derby-hatted average citizen. He was ungrammatical and jocose; he panted
a good deal and gurgled his soup; his nails were ragged-edged, his
stupid brown tie uneven, and there were signs of a growing grossness and
fatty unwieldiness about his neck, his shoulders, his waist. But he was
affable. He quietly helped Sanford in ordering lunch, to the great
economy of embarrassment. He was smilingly ready to explain to Una how a
paint company office was run; what chances there were for a girl. He
seemed to know his business, he didn't gossip, and his heavy,
coarse-lipped smile was almost sweet when he said to Una, "Makes a
hard-cased old widower like me pretty lonely to see this nice kid and
girly here. Eh? Wish I had some children like them myself."

He wasn't vastly different from Henry Carson, this Mr. Schwirtz, but he
had a mechanical city smartness in his manner and a jocular energy which
the stringy-necked Henry quite lacked.

Because she liked to be with Sanford Hunt, hoped to get from Mr. Julius
Edward Schwirtz still more of the feeling of how actual business men do
business, she hoped for another lunch.

But a crisis unexpected and alarming came to interrupt her happy
progress to a knowledge of herself and men.


§ 5

The Goldens had owned no property in Panama, Pennsylvania; they had
rented their house. Captain Lew Golden, who was so urgent in advising
others to purchase real estate--with a small, justifiable commission to
himself--had never quite found time to decide on his own real-estate
investments. When they had come to New York, Una and her mother had
given up the house and sold the heavier furniture, the big beds, the
stove. The rest of the furniture they had brought to the city and
installed in a little flat way up on 148th Street.

Her mother was, Una declared, so absolutely the lady that it was a
crying shame to think of her immured here in their elevatorless
tenement; this new, clean, barren building of yellow brick, its face
broken out with fire-escapes. It had narrow halls, stairs of slate
treads and iron rails, and cheap wooden doorways which had begun to warp
the minute the structure was finished--and sold. The bright-green burlap
wall-covering in the hallways had faded in less than a year to the color
of dry grass. The janitor grew tired every now and then. He had been
markedly diligent at first, but he was already giving up the task of
keeping the building clean. It was one of, and typical of, a mile of
yellow brick tenements; it was named after an African orchid of great
loveliness, and it was filled with clerks, motormen, probationer
policemen, and enormously prolific women in dressing-sacques.

The Goldens had three rooms and bath. A small linoleous gas-stove
kitchen. A bedroom with standing wardrobe, iron bed, and just one
graceful piece of furniture--Una's dressing-table; a room pervasively
feminine in its scent and in the little piles of lingerie which Mrs.
Golden affected more, not less, as she grew older. The living-room, with
stiff, brown, woolen brocade chairs, transplanted from their Panama
home, a red plush sofa, two large oak-framed Biblical pictures--"The
Wedding-feast at Cana," and "Solomon in His Temple." This living-room
had never been changed since the day of their moving in. Una repeatedly
coveted the German color-prints she saw in shop windows, but she had to
economize.

She planned that when she should succeed they would have such an
apartment of white enamel and glass doors and mahogany as she saw
described in the women's magazines. She realized mentally that her
mother must be lonely in the long hours of waiting for her return, but
she who was busy all day could never feel emotionally how great was that
loneliness, and she expected her mother to be satisfied with the future.

Quite suddenly, a couple of weeks after the dance, when they were
talking about the looming topic--what kind of work Una would be able to
get when she should have completed school--her mother fell violently
a-weeping; sobbed, "Oh, Una baby, I want to go home. I'm so lonely
here--just nobody but you and the Sessionses. Can't we go back to
Panama? You don't seem to really know what you _are_ going to do."

"Why, mother--"

Una loved her mother, yet she felt a grim disgust, rather than pity....
Just when she had been working so hard! And for her mother as much as
for herself.... She stalked over to the table, severely rearranged the
magazines, slammed down a newspaper, and turned, angrily. "Why, can't
you see? I _can't_ give up my work now."

"Couldn't you get something to do in Panama, dearie?"

"You know perfectly well that I tried."

"But maybe now, with your college course and all--even if it took a
little longer to get something there, we'd be right among the folks we
know--"

"Mother, can't you understand that we have only a little over three
hundred dollars now? If we moved again and everything, we wouldn't have
two hundred dollars to live on. Haven't you _any_ sense of finances?"

"You must not talk to me that way, my daughter!"

A slim, fine figure of hurt-dignity, Mrs. Golden left the room, lay down
in the bedroom, her face away from the door where Una stood in
perplexity. Una ran to her, kissed her shoulder, begged for forgiveness.
Her mother patted her cheek, and sobbed, "Oh, it doesn't matter," in a
tone so forlorn and lonely that it did matter, terribly. The sadness of
it tortured Una while she was realizing that her mother had lost all
practical comprehension of the details of life, was become a child,
trusting everything to her daughter, yet retaining a power of suffering
such as no child can know.

It had been easy to bring her mother here, to start a career. Both of
them had preconceived a life of gaiety and beauty, of charming people
and pictures and concerts. But all those graces were behind a dusty wall
of shorthand and typewriting. Una's struggle in coming to New York had
just begun.

Gently arbitrary, dearer than ever to Una in her helpless longing for
kindly neighbors and the familiar places, Mrs. Golden went on hoping
that she could persuade Una to go back to Panama. She never seemed to
realize that their capital wasn't increasing as time passed. Sometimes
impatient at her obtuseness, sometimes passionate with comprehending
tenderness, Una devoted herself to her, and Mr. Schwirtz and Sanford
Hunt and Sam Weintraub and Todd faded. She treasured her mother's
happiness at their Christmas dinner with the Sessionses. She encouraged
the Sessionses to come up to the flat as often as they could, and she
lulled her mother to a tolerable calm boredom. Before it was convenient
to think of men again, her school-work was over.

The commercial college had a graduation once a month. On January 15,
1906, Una finished her course, regretfully said good-by to Sam
Weintraub, and to Sanford Hunt, who had graduated in mid-December, but
had come back for "class commencement"; and at the last moment she
hesitated so long over J. J. Todd's hints about calling some day, that
he was discouraged and turned away. Una glanced about the
study-hall--the first place where she had ever been taken seriously as a
worker--and marched off to her first battle in the war of business.




CHAPTER IV


Sanford Hunt telephoned to Una that he and Mr. Julius Edward
Schwirtz--whom he called "Eddie"--had done their best to find an
"opening" for her in the office of the Lowry Paint Company, but that
there was no chance.

The commercial college gave her the names of several possible employers,
but they all wanted approximate perfection at approximately nothing a
week. After ten days of panic-stricken waiting at the employment office
of a typewriter company, and answering want advertisements, the
typewriter people sent her to the office of the _Motor and Gas Gazette_,
a weekly magazine for the trade. In this atmosphere of the literature of
lubricating oil and drop forgings and body enamels, as an
eight-dollar-a-week copyist, Una first beheld the drama and romance of
the office world.


§ 2

There is plenty of romance in business. Fine, large, meaningless,
general terms like romance and business can always be related. They take
the place of thinking, and are highly useful to optimists and lecturers.

But in the world of business there is a bewildered new Muse of Romance,
who is clad not in silvery tissue of dreams, but in a neat blue suit
that won't grow too shiny under the sleeves.

Adventure now, with Una, in the world of business; of offices and jobs
and tired, ordinary people who know such reality of romance as your
masquerading earl, your shoddy Broadway actress, or your rosily amorous
dairy-maid could never imagine. The youths of poetry and of the modern
motor-car fiction make a long diversion of love; while the sleezy-coated
office-man who surprises a look of humanness in the weary eyes of the
office-woman, knows that he must compress all the wonder of madness into
five minutes, because the Chief is prowling about, glancing meaningly at
the little signs that declare, "Your time is your employer's money;
don't steal it."

A world is this whose noblest vista is composed of desks and
typewriters, filing-cases and insurance calendars, telephones, and the
bald heads of men who believe dreams to be idiotic. Here, no galleon
breasts the sky-line; no explorer in evening clothes makes love to an
heiress. Here ride no rollicking cowboys, nor heroes of the great
European war. It is a world whose crises you cannot comprehend unless
you have learned that the difference between a 2-A pencil and a 2-B
pencil is at least equal to the contrast between London and Tibet;
unless you understand why a normally self-controlled young woman may
have a week of tragic discomfort because she is using a billing-machine
instead of her ordinary correspondence typewriter. The shifting of the
water-cooler from the front office to the packing-room may be an epochal
event to a copyist who apparently has no human existence beyond bending
over a clacking typewriter, who seems to have no home, no family, no
loves; in whom all pride and wonder of life and all transforming drama
seem to be satisfied by the possession of a new V-necked blouse. The
moving of the water-cooler may mean that she must now pass the sentinel
office-manager; that therefore she no longer dares break the incredible
monotony by expeditions to get glasses of water. As a consequence she
gives up the office and marries unhappily.

A vast, competent, largely useless cosmos of offices. It spends much
energy in causing advertisements of beer and chewing-gum and union suits
and pot-cleansers to spread over the whole landscape. It marches out
ponderous battalions to sell a brass pin. It evokes shoes that are
uncomfortable, hideous, and perishable, and touchingly hopes that all
women will aid the cause of good business by wearing them. It turns
noble valleys into fields for pickles. It compels men whom it has never
seen to toil in distant factories and produce useless wares, which are
never actually brought into the office, but which it nevertheless sells
to the heathen in the Solomon Islands in exchange for commodities whose
very names it does not know; and in order to perform this miracle of
transmutation it keeps stenographers so busy that they change from dewy
girls into tight-lipped spinsters before they discover life.

The reason for it all, nobody who is actually engaged in it can tell
you, except the bosses, who believe that these sacred rites of composing
dull letters and solemnly filing them away are observed in order that
they may buy the large automobiles in which they do not have time to
take the air. Efficiency of production they have learned; efficiency of
life they still consider an effeminate hobby.

An unreasonable world, sacrificing bird-song and tranquil dusk and high
golden noons to selling junk--yet it rules us. And life lives there. The
office is filled with thrills of love and distrust and ambition. Each
alley between desks quivers with secret romance as ceaselessly as a
battle-trench, or a lane in Normandy.


§ 3

Una's first view of the _Motor and Gas Gazette_ was of an overwhelming
mass of desks and files and books, and a confusing, spying crowd of
strange people, among whom the only safe, familiar persons were Miss
Moynihan, the good-natured solid block of girl whom she had known at the
commercial college, and Mr. S. Herbert Ross, the advertising-manager,
who had hired her. Mr. Ross was a poet of business; a squat, nervous
little man, whose hair was cut in a Dutch bang, straight across his
forehead, and who always wore a black bow tie and semi-clerical black
clothes. He had eyed Una amusedly, asked her what was her reaction to
green and crimson posters, and given her a little book by himself, "R U
A Time-clock, Mr. Man?" which, in large and tremendously black type,
related two stories about the youth of Carnegie, and strongly advocated
industry, correspondence schools, and expensive advertising. When Una
entered the office, as a copyist, Mr. S. Herbert Ross turned her over to
the office-manager, and thereafter ignored her; but whenever she saw him
in pompous conference with editors and advertisers she felt proudly that
she knew him.

The commercial college had trained her to work with a number of people,
as she was now to do in the office; but in the seriousness and savage
continuity of its toil, the office was very different. There was no
let-up; she couldn't shirk for a day or two, as she had done at the
commercial college. It was not so much that she was afraid of losing her
job as that she came to see herself as part of a chain. The others,
beyond, were waiting for her; she mustn't hold them up. That was her
first impression of the office system, that and the insignificance of
herself in the presence of the office-hierarchy--manager above manager
and the Mysterious Owner beyond all. She was alone; once she
transgressed they would crush her. They had no personal interest in her,
none of them, except her classmate, Miss Moynihan, who smiled at her and
went out to lunch with her.

They two did not dare to sit over parcels of lunch with the curious
other girls. Before fifteen-cent lunches of baked apples, greasy
Napoleons, and cups of coffee, at a cheap restaurant, Miss Moynihan and
she talked about the office-manager, the editors, the strain of copying
all day, and they united in lyric hatred of the lieutenant of the girls,
a satiric young woman who was a wonderful hater. Una had regarded Miss
Moynihan as thick and stupid, but not when she had thought of falling in
love with Charlie Martindale at a dance at Panama, not in her most
fervid hours of comforting her mother, had she been so closely in
sympathy with any human being as she was with Miss Moynihan when they
went over and over the problems of office politics, office favorites,
office rules, office customs.

The customs were simple: Certain hours for arrival, for lunch, for
leaving; women's retiring-room embarrassedly discovered to be on
the right behind the big safe; water-cooler in the center of the
stenographers' room. But the office prejudices, the taboos, could
not be guessed. They offered you every possible chance of "queering
yourself." Miss Moynihan, on her very first day, discovered,
perspiringly, that you must never mention the _Gazette's_ rival,
the _Internal Combustion News_. The _Gazette's_ attitude was
that the _News_ did not exist--except when the _Gazette_
wanted the plate of an advertisement which the _News_ was to
forward. You mustn't chew gum in the office; you were to ask favors
of the lieutenant, not of the office-manager; and you mustn't be
friendly with Mr. Bush of the circulation department, nor with Miss
Caldwell, the filing-clerk. Why they were taboo Una never knew; it
was an office convention; they seemed pleasant and proper people
enough.

She was initiated into the science of office supplies. In the commercial
college the authorities had provided stenographers' note-books and
pencils, and the representatives of typewriter companies had given
lectures on cleaning and oiling typewriters, putting in new ribbons,
adjusting tension-wheels. But Una had not realized how many tools she
had to know----

Desks, filing-cabinets, mimeographs, adding-machines, card indexes, desk
calendars, telephone-extensions, adjustable desk-lights. Wire
correspondence-baskets, erasers, carbon paper, type-brushes, dust-rags,
waste-baskets. Pencils, hard and soft, black and blue and red. Pens,
pen-points, backing-sheets, note-books, paper-clips. Mucilage, paste,
stationery; the half-dozen sorts of envelopes and letter-heads.

Tools were these, as important in her trade as the masthead and black
flag, the cutlasses and crimson sashes, the gold doubloons and damsels
fair of pirate fiction; or the cheese and cream, old horses and
slumberous lanes of rustic comedy. As important, and perhaps to be
deemed as romantic some day; witness the rhapsodic advertisements of
filing-cabinets that are built like battle-ships; of carbon-paper that
is magic-inked and satin-smooth.

Not as priest or soldier or judge does youth seek honor to-day, but as a
man of offices. The business subaltern, charming and gallant as the
jungle-gallopers of Kipling, drills files, not of troops, but of
correspondence. The artist plays the keys, not of pianos, but of
typewriters. Desks, not decks; courts of office-buildings, not of
palaces--these are the stuff of our latter-day drama. Not through
wolf-haunted forests nor purple cañons, but through tiled hallways and
elevators move our heroes of to-day.

And our heroine is important not because she is an Amazon or a Ramona,
but because she is representative of some millions of women in business,
and because, in a vague but undiscouraged way, she keeps on inquiring
what women in business can do to make human their existence of loveless
routine.


§ 4

Una spent much of her time in copying over and over--a hundred times,
two hundred times--form-letters soliciting advertising, letters too
personal in appearance to be multigraphed. She had lists of
manufacturers of motor-car accessories, of makers of lubricating oils,
of distributors of ball-bearings and speedometers and springs and
carburetors and compositions for water-proofing automobile tops.

Sometimes she was requisitioned by the editorial department to copy in
form legible for the printer the rough items sent in by outsiders for
publication in the _Gazette_. Una, like most people of Panama, had
believed that there was something artistic about the office of any
publication. One would see editors--wonderful men like grand dukes,
prone to lunch with the President. But there was nothing artistic about
the editorial office of the _Gazette_--several young men in
shirt-sleeves and green celluloid eye-shades, very slangy and
pipe-smelly, and an older man with unpressed trousers and ragged
mustache. Nor was there anything literary in the things that Una copied
for the editorial department; just painfully handwritten accounts of the
meeting of the Southeastern Iowa Auto-dealers' Association; or boasts
about the increased sales of Roadeater Tires, a page originally smartly
typed, but cut and marked up by the editors.

Lists and letters and items, over and over; sitting at her typewriter
till her shoulder-blades ached and she had to shut her eyes to the blur
of the keys. The racket of office noises all day. The three-o'clock hour
when she felt that she simply could not endure the mill till five
o'clock. No interest in anything she wrote. Then the blessed hour of
release, the stretching of cramped legs, and the blind creeping to the
Subway, the crush in the train, and home to comfort the mother who had
been lonely all day.

Such was Una's routine in these early months of 1906. After the novelty
of the first week it was all rigidly the same, except that distinct
personalities began to emerge from the mass.

Especially the personality of Walter Babson.


§ 5

Out of the mist of strange faces, blurred hordes of people who swaggered
up the office aisle so knowingly, and grinned at her when she asked
questions, individualities began to take form:

Miss Moynihan; the Jewish stenographer with the laughing lips and hot
eyes; the four superior older girls in a corner, the still more superior
girl lieutenant, and the office-manager, who was the least superior of
all; the telephone-girl; the office-boys; Mr. S. Herbert Ross and his
assistant; the managing editor; a motor magnate whose connection was
mysterious; the owner, a courteous, silent, glancing man who was
reported to be hard and "stingy."

Other people still remained unidentifiable to her, but the office
appeared smaller and less formidable in a month. Out of each nine
square feet of floor space in the office a novel might have been made:
the tale of the managing editor's neurotic wife; the tragedy of Chubby
Hubbard, the stupid young editor who had been a college football star,
then an automobile racer, then a failure. And indeed there was a whole
novel, a story told and retold, in the girls' gossip about each of the
men before whom they were so demure. But it was Walter Babson whom the
girls most discussed and in whom Una found the most interest.

On her first day in the office she had been startled by an astounding
young man who had come flying past her desk, with his coat off, his
figured waistcoat half open, his red four-in-hand tie askew under a
rolling soft collar. He had dashed up to the office-manager and
demanded, "Say! Say! Nat! Got that Kokomobile description copied for me
yet? Heh? Gawd! you're slow. Got a cigarette?" He went off, puffing out
cigarette smoke, shaking his head and audibly muttering, "Slow bunch,
werry." He seemed to be of Una's own age, or perhaps a year older--a
slender young man with horn-rimmed eye-glasses, curly black hair, and a
trickle of black mustache. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbow, and
Una had a secret, shamed, shivering thrill in the contrast of the
dead-white skin of his thin forearms with the long, thick, soft, black
hairs matted over them. They seemed at once feminine and acidly male.

"Crazy idiot," she observed, apparently describing herself and the
nervous young man together. But she knew that she wanted to see him
again.

She discovered that he was prone to such violent appearances; that his
name was Walter Babson; that he was one of the three desk editors under
the managing editor; that the stenographers and office-boys alternately
disapproved of him, because he went on sprees and borrowed money from
anybody in sight, and adored him because he was democratically frank
with them. He was at once a hero, clown, prodigal son, and preacher of
honesty. It was variously said that he was a socialist, an anarchist,
and a believer in an American monarchy, which he was reported as
declaring would "give some color to this flat-faced province of a
country." It was related that he had been "fresh" even to the owner, and
had escaped discharge only by being the quickest worker in the office,
the best handy man at turning motor statistics into lively news-stories.
Una saw that he liked to stand about, bawling to the quizzical S.
Herbert Ross that "this is a hell of a shop to work in--rotten pay and
no _esprit de corps_. I'd quit and free-lance if I could break in with
fiction, but a rotten bunch of log-rollers have got the inside track
with all the magazines and book-publishers."

"Ever try to write any fiction?" Una once heard S. Herbert retort.

"No, but Lord! any fool could write better stuff than they publish. It's
all a freeze-out game; editors just accept stuff by their friends."

In one week Una heard Walter Babson make approximately the same
assertions to three different men, and to whoever in the open office
might care to listen and profit thereby. Then, apparently, he ceased to
hear the call of literature, and he snorted at S. Herbert Ross's stodgy
assistant that he was a wage-slave, and a fool not to form a clerks'
union. In a week or two he was literary again. He dashed down to the
office-manager, poked a sheet of copy-paper at him, and yelped: "Say,
Nat. Read that and tell me just what you think of it. I'm going to put
some literary flavor into the _Gas-bag_ even if it does explode it.
Look--see. I've taken a boost for the Kells Karburetor--rotten lying
boost it is, too--and turned it into this running verse, read it like
prose, pleasant and easy to digest, especially beneficial to children
and S. Herbert Souse, Sherbert Souse, I mean." He rapidly read an
amazing lyric beginning, "Motorists, you hadn't better monkey with the
carburetor, all the racers, all the swells, have equipped their cars
with Kells. We are privileged to announce what will give the trade a
jounce, that the floats have been improved like all motorists would have
loved."

He broke off and shouted, "Punk last line, but I'll fix it up. Say,
that'll get 'em all going, eh? Say, I bet the Kells people use it in
bill-board ads. all over the country, and maybe sign my name. Ads., why
say, it takes a literary guy to write ads., not a fat-headed
commercialist like S. Charlie Hoss."

Two days later Una heard Babson come out and lament that the managing
editor didn't like his masterpiece and was going to use the Kells
Karburetor Kompany's original write-up. "That's what you get when you
try to give the _Gas-bag_ some literary flavor--don't appreciate it!"

She would rather have despised him, except that he stopped by the
office-boys' bench to pull their hair and tell them to read English
dictionaries. And when Miss Moynihan looked dejected, Babson demanded of
her, "What's trouble, girlie? Anybody I can lick for you? Glad to fire
the owner, or anything. Haven't met you yet, but my name is Roosevelt,
and I'm the new janitor," with a hundred other chuckling idiocies, till
Miss Moynihan was happy again. Una warmed to his friendliness, like that
of a tail-wagging little yellow pup.

And always she craved the touch of his dark, blunt, nervous hands.
Whenever he lighted a cigarette she was startled by his masculine way
of putting out the match and jerking it away from him in one abrupt
motion.... She had never studied male mannerisms before. To Miss Golden
of Panama men had always been "the boys."

All this time Walter Babson had never spoken to her.




CHAPTER V


The office-manager came casually up to Una'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--"

Una was so excited that she called herself a silly little fool. She
seized her untouched note-book, 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 blue-prints 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 over-flowed 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 practised 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 feat 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 immejit 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 Harman does, right now. That's all."


§ 2

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 bran
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
MacThrostle 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 mottoes.

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 shiftlessness 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, oh 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 in 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 shawled 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 brows
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 plane 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
some one 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 cheek-bone. 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 some place 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. Some time 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 are so modest, Mr. Babson. Every girl in the
office thinks you write better than any of the other editors."

"Yuh--but they don't know. They think that just because I chuck 'em
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
rôtisserie with a newspaper for companion. Well--g' night and g' 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.


§ 3

François Villons 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-scented 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 authoresses 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 naïve 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 near-by town, Walter had won all the
prizes for essays and debating, and had learned a good deal about
Shakespeare and Cæsar and George Washington. Also he had learned a good
deal about drinking beer, smoking manfully, and tempting the giggling
girls who hung about the "deepot." 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 hoboes, sailors, longshoremen, miners, cow-punchers,
lunch-room 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; its lively little symposia, by such successful
market-gardeners of literature as Mamie Stuyvesant Blupp and Bill Brown
and Dr. J. F. Fitzneff, 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." _Wanderlust_ 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."

Pathos 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 Turgenieff. And pathos 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
gilt 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 into 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 Putumayo 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 plodding 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 _filles 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 youth's 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
declaimed--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 rarified 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,
miners, cow-punchers, and young ladies of quite astounding courage. He
was twenty-seven years old when he met Una Golden. He still read Omar
Khayyam. 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.


§ 4

It was Una's first city spring.

Save in the squares, where the bourgeoning trees made green-lighted
spaces for noon-time lovers, there was no change; no blossomy stir 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. Grind-organs made music for ragged, dancing
children, and old brick buildings smelled warm. Peanut-wagons came out
with a long, shrill whine, locusts 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 to-day"; 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 some one 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, bareheaded, their arms about one another, their
spring-time 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 Cortlandt 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!
honest, Tess, he's a swell fellow." She caught herself wanting to tramp
the Palisades with--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 as 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 otherwhere, 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.


§ 5

He came clattering down the aisle of desks 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 to-night. Can you make me some copies? You can
use onion-skin paper and carbon 'em and make anyway five copies at a
whack. But prob'ly you'd have to stay late. Got anything on to-night?
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 could 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 five-thirty, 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 gasoleny man in a pin-checked 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, roe-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. Una 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. Una 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 daubed 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! Gimme 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 a 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 to-day till my mouth tastes like a
fish-market. Want to eat and forget my troubles."

With her excitement dulled to a matter-of-fact hungriness, 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 mottoes painted on the wood, the individual table
lights in pink shades. "Just forget the eats, Miss Golden, and you can
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 soothe away his
office weariness. She 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. Actually she was feeling
resentfully that no saw-voiced, galumphing 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 epicurean 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 catsup,
Worcestershire 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 any one 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 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 lam 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 housed 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
s'pose I'm terribly unladylike to tell you."

"Gee whiz!" he marveled. "Got an admirer! And I always thought you were
an uncommonly level-headed girl. Shows how you can fool 'em."

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
Tolstoi'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, Elbert 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 quatrain 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 chatelaine, 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 jus' 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 enthusiasms was only a
background for her flare 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, "It's terribly late. Don't you think it is?" and knew that
she was arising. But she moved beside him down the street in languor,
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 and dragging
voice, 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 snappily, 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
some one who could "appreciate his honest-t'-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 to-night? Feel
this breeze on your lips--it's simply plumb-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 faunlike 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 offn my desk. And
maybe you'll let me be court jester."

"Why do you say I'll--oh, be a queen? Do you mean literally, in
business, an executive?"

"Hadn't thought just what it did 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 up and fall all over their foolish faces when they
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; "we _got_ to walk a block 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
to-night! 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 her 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
to-night!" 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 herself, "Some day he _will_ kiss me, and I'm _not_ sorry he
didn't to-night--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!"




CHAPTER VI


"I never thought a nice girl could be in love with a man who is bad, and
I s'pose 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 meet a man 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, "Mornin', 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 accept with naïve 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 she watched him peer 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 wambled up to her at last and asked for a 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 wont 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, you want to
watch 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 jus' 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 about some
papers--"

"Oh yes, sure! Lemme 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--"

"'They say'!"

"Now don't you go and get peeved after you and me been such good
friends, Miss Golden. I don't know that this Babson fellow ever done
anything worse than eat cracker-jack at South Beach, but I was just
telling you what they all say--how he drinks and goes with a lot of
totties and all; but--but he's all right if you say so, and--honest t'
Gawd, Miss Golden, listen, honest, I wouldn't knock him for nothing if I
thought he was your fellow! 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 into a place for dreams. And she
fierily 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 five-thirty, 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."


§ 2

Una had always mechanically liked children; had ejaculated, "Oh, the
pink little darling!" over each neighborhood infant; had pictured
children of her own; but 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, as she watched a
baby of faint, brown ringlets--hair that would be black like Walter's.
Later she chided herself for being so bold, so un-Panamanian; 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 mussed waists 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 conscious of her mother, up-stairs. 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 she ventured to say, ever so casually: "I feel sort
of headachy. 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,
and trailed 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 m' head off--just missed Subway express--couldn't make
it--whew, 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 eye-glasses,
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!"

"Y-yuh; why, s-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, 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 some place-- Come walk toward the river."

"Oh, I daren't really, Walter. My mother feels so--so fidgety to-night
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 scent of him--scent 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 finger-tips.

"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 down-stairs 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
lemme 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 to-night....
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.


§ 3

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 raucously, 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.


§ 4

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 crêpe?"

"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 ah'd and oh'd over the torn border of Una's crêpe
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 primly, 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 respectably
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 jaw as though
he needed a shave. He took off his eye-glasses 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 new 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
hand 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, Walter's, 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 and 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 of 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 murmurer.

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 yawp 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 acerb, "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 gibes 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 kodaks 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 a peril 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.




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. Walter 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-suey. He took her to an
Italian restaurant and pointed out supposititious artists. They had
gallery seats for a Maude Adams play, at which she cried and laughed
whole-heartedly 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 and 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.


§ 2

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. Almost 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 rereading, 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. And 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).


§ 3

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 and 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, birdlike 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 Sessionses' 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.
Often 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 flour-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.
Always he was kindly, but the kindliness 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."


§ 4

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 lights 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 cynicisms 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 Catskills.

She would have been content to sit there for hours, listening to the
twilight, absently pleating the coarse table-cloth, trying to sip the
saline claret which he insisted on their drinking. She wanted nothing
more.... And she had so manoeuvered 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
volubly 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 riverside 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 war-path of the Indians. It climbs ridges, twists
among rocks, dips into damp hollows, widens out into tiny bowling-greens
for Hendrik Hudson's fairy men. 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 counsel 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: "Besides,
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 bran-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'd trust you to
the limit--you're sincere and you want to grow. But me--my Wanderjahr
isn't over yet. Maybe some time 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 Y. M. C. A. boy--I bow to
conventions, too. Lordy! the fact that I'm so old-fashioned as even to
talk about 'conventions' in this age of Shaw and d'Annunzio 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 in
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 discussed 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 kindliness 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. And 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.


§ 5

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. He
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-by, Goldie," and passed on.
She stared, hypnotized, as, for the last time, Walter went bouncing out
of the office.


§ 6

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.


§ 7

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.


§ 8

For weeks she missed him so tragically that she found herself muttering
over and over, "Now I sha'n'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 Sessionses.

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. Suddenly, 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. This 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 fiancée, a young widow, she let the
fleeting sun-flecked land absorb her soul.

At the office Una was transferred to S. Herbert Ross's department, upon
Walter's 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 business woman. 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 tight-wad 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 Vandyke 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 mustache, and took
interest in cameras, player-pianos, phonographs, small motor-cars,
speedometers, tires, patent nicotineless 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."


§ 2

Una Golden had been the chief of Mr. Troy Wilkins's two stenographers
for seven months now--midsummer 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 tooth-paste. 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
re-read every week or two; she had her mother and, always, her job.


§ 3

Una, an errand-boy, and a young East-Side Jewish stenographer named
Bessie Kraker 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 turn-over." It is semi-fire-proof, but more semi
than fire-proof. It stands on Nassau Street, between two portly stone
buildings that try to squeeze this lanky impostor to death, but there is
more cheerful whistling in its hallways than in the halls of its
disapproving neighbors. Near 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 East-Side Bessie Kraker, 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.


§ 4

Twelve o'clock, 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
wash-rooms to discuss with one another the hang of new skirts. All
morning Bessie Kraker had kept up a monologue, beginning, "Say, lis-ten,
Miss Golden, say, gee! I was goin' down to South Beach with my gentleman
friend this afternoon, and, say, what d'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 G. M. Oh, you sad sea
waves! I bet Sadie and me make 'em 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 Talmud all the time, and hates Goys. But gee! I can't stand it all
the time being a mollycoddle. I wisht I was a boy! I'd be a' 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 11.17, after giving them enough work to last
till noon. The office-boy chattily 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 malines.

Una stayed till twelve. Her ambition had solidified into an unreasoning
conscientiousness.

With Bessie gone, the office was so quiet that she hesitated to
typewrite 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 hat-pins, and hastened
to the elevator, exulting in freedom. The elevator was crowded with
girls in new white frocks, voluble about their afternoon's plans. One of
them carried a wicker suit-case. 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 twilights.

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
patted her small black hand-bag. 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 Kraker had
insisted, with the nonchalant shrillness of eighteen, that Una "had
ought to 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 waists, with one hint of coquetry in a white-lace jabot or a
white-lace veil; faces slightly sallow or channeled with care, but eyes
that longed 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 "_grande amoureuse_." 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 baby-land. He was feeling deep
sensations about Clytemnestra's misfortunes--though he controlled his
features in the most gentlemanly manner, and rose composedly at his
station, letting a well-bred glance of pity fall upon the gum-chewers.

Una found a marvelously clean, new restaurant on Sixth Avenue, with lace
curtains at the window and, between the curtains, a red geranium in a
pot covered with red-crêpe 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 week-day lunches. She entered
the new restaurant briskly, swinging her black bag. The place had
Personality--the white enameled tables were set diagonally and clothed
with strips of Japanese toweling. Una smiled at a lively photograph of
two bunnies in a basket. With a sensation of freedom and novelty she
ordered coffee, chicken patty, and cocoanut 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.


§ 5

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 woolen voiles, 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 and 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 "Berline 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 theater, and a train-wreck, a seaside
love-scene, a detective drama, all invited her.

A man in the seat in front of her in the theater 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 theater, 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 theater,"
Una comforted herself. "I'll go down to Lady Sessions's this evening.
I'll pack mother off to bed. I'll take the Sessionses 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"--knowing all the while that her mother would not
come, and decidedly would care if Una deserted her.

However negligible her mother seemed from down-town, 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.


§ 6

As Una began to trudge up the flat-sounding slate treads she discovered
that her head was aching as though some one 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,
squeeze the office weariness from her soul. The Little Mother 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. "Huh!" she grunted. "Got a cold again.
If she'd only stay outdoors 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--deary? 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 instalment 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. "C-could I have--window closed 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. Una 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. "Doctor Smyth 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 pneum

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