Mr. Wilkins
was content with an office shabby and inconvenient. He regarded
beautiful offices as in some way effeminate.... His wasn't effeminate;
it was undecorative as a filled ash-tray, despite Una's daily following
up of the careless scrubwomen with dust-cloth and whisk. She knew every
inch of it, as a gardener knows his plot. She could never keep from
noticing and running her finger along the pebbled glass of the
oak-and-glass partition about Mr. Wilkins's private office, each of the
hundreds of times a day she passed it; and when she lay awake at
midnight, her finger-tips would recall precisely the feeling of that
rough surface, even to the sharp edges of a tiny flaw in the glass over
the bookcase.

Or she would recall the floor-rag--symbol of the hard realness of the
office grind....

It always hung over the twisted, bulbous lead pipes below the stationary
basin in the women's wash-room provided by the Septimus Building for the
women on three floors. It was a rag ancient and slate-gray, grotesquely
stiff and grotesquely hairy at its frayed edges--a corpse of a scrub-rag
in _rigor mortis_. Una was annoyed with herself for ever observing so
unlovely an object, but in the moment of relaxation when she went to
wash her hands she was unduly sensitive to that eternal rag, and to the
griminess of the wash-room--the cracked and yellow-stained wash-bowl,
the cold water that stung in winter, the roller-towel which she spun
round and round in the effort to find a dry, clean, square space, till,
in a spasm of revulsion, she would bolt out of the wash-room with her
face and hands half dried.

Woman's place is in the home. Una was doubtless purely perverse in
competing with men for the commercial triumphs of running that gray, wet
towel round and round on its clattering roller, and of wondering whether
for the entire remainder of her life she would see that dead scrub-rag.

It was no less annoying a fact that Bessie and she had only one
waste-basket, which was invariably at Bessie's desk when Una reached for
it.

Or that the door of the supply-cupboard always shivered and stuck.

Or that on Thursday, which is the three P.M. of the week, it seemed
impossible to endure the tedium till Saturday noon; and that,
invariably, her money was gone by Friday, so that Friday lunch was
always a mere insult to her hunger, and she could never get her gloves
from the cleaner till after Saturday pay-day.

Una knew the office to a poin