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.