§ 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."