l 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,