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."