g. A clean space, but damp, stale, like the
corridor to a prison--as indeed it was, since through it each morning
Una entered the day's business life.

Then, the train approaching, filling the tunnel, like a piston smashing
into a cylinder; the shoving rush to get aboard. A crush that was
ruffling and fatiguing to a man, but to a woman was horror.

Una stood with a hulking man pressing as close to her side as he dared,
and a dapper clerkling squeezed against her breast. Above her head, to
represent the city's culture and graciousness, there were advertisements
of soap, stockings, and collars. At curves the wheels ground with a
long, savage whine, the train heeled, and she was flung into the arms of
the grinning clerk, who held her tight. She, who must never be so
unladylike as to enter a polling-place, had breathed into her very mouth
the clerkling's virile electoral odor of cigarettes and onions and
decayed teeth.

A very good thing, the Subway. It did make Una quiver with the
beginnings of rebellious thought as no suave preacher could ever have
done. Almost hysterically she resented this daily indignity, which
smeared her clean, cool womanhood with a grease of noise and smell and
human contact.

As was the Subway, so were her noons of elbowing to get impure food in
restaurants.

For reward she was permitted to work all day with Troy Wilkins. And for
heavens and green earth, she had a chair and a desk.

But the human organism, which can modify itself to arctic cold and
Indian heat, to incessant labor or the long enervation of luxury, learns
to endure. Unwilling dressing, lonely breakfast, the Subway, dull work,
lunch, sleepiness after lunch, the hopelessness of three o'clock, the
boss's ill-tempers, then the Subway again, and a lonely flat with no
love, no creative work; and at last a long sleep so that she might be
fresh for such another round of delight. So went the days. Yet all
through them she found amusement, laughed now and then, and proved the
heroism as well as the unthinking servility of the human race.

Sec. 2

The need of feeling that there were people near to her urged Una to sell
her furniture and move from the flat to a boarding-house.

She avoided Mrs. Sessions's advice. She was sure that Mrs. Sessions
would bustle about and find her a respectable place where she would have
to be cheery. She didn't want to be cheery. She wanted to think. She
even bought a serious magazine with articles. Not