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 e