waiting, the same slatternly,
suspicious landlady, the same evil hallway with a brown hat-rack, a
steel-engraving with one corner stained with yellow, a carpet worn
through to the flooring in a large oval hole just in front of the
stairs, a smell of cabbage, a lack of ventilation. Always the same
desire to escape, though she waited politely while the landlady in the
same familiar harsh voice went through the same formula.

Then, before she could flee to the comparatively fresh air of the
streets, Una would politely have to follow the panting landlady to a
room that was a horror of dirty carpet, lumpy mattress, and furniture
with everything worn off that could wear off. And at last, always the
same phrases by which Una meant to spare the woman: "Well, I'll think it
over. Thank you so much for showing me the rooms, but before I
decide-- Want to look around--"

Phrases which the landlady heard ten times a day.

She conceived a great-hearted pity for landladies. They were so patient,
in face of her evident distaste. Even their suspiciousness was but the
growling of a beaten dog. They sighed and closed their doors on her
without much attempt to persuade her to stay. Her heart ached with their
lack of imagination. They had no more imagination than those landladies
of the insect world, the spiders, with their unchanging, instinctive,
ancestral types of webs.

Her depression was increased by the desperate physical weariness of the
hunt. Not that afternoon, not till two weeks later, did she find a room
in a large, long, somber railroad flat on Lexington Avenue, conducted by
a curly-haired young bookkeeper and his pretty wife, who provided their
clients with sympathy, with extensive and scientific data regarding the
motion-picture houses in the neighborhood, and board which was neither
scientific nor very extensive.

It was time for Una to sacrifice the last material contact with her
mother; to sell the furniture which she had known ever since, as a baby
in Panama, she had crawled from this horsehair chair, all the long and
perilous way across this same brown carpet, to this red-plush couch.

Sec. 3

It was not so hard to sell the furniture; she could even read and burn
her father's letters with an unhappy resoluteness. Despite her
tenderness, Una had something of youth's joy in getting rid of old
things, as preparation for acquiring the new. She did sob when she found
her mother's straw hat, just as Mrs. Golden had lef