ued her study of city ways and city
currents during her lunch-hours. She went down to Broad Street to see
the curb market; marveled at the men with telephones in little coops
behind opened windows; stared at the great newspaper offices on Park
Row, the old City Hall, the mingling on lower Broadway of
sky-challenging buildings with the history of pre-Revolutionary days.
She got a momentary prejudice in favor of socialism from listening to an
attack upon it by a noon-time orator--a spotted, badly dressed man whose
favorite slur regarding socialists was that they were spotted and badly
dressed. She heard a negro shouting dithyrambics about some religion she
could never make out.

Sometimes she lunched at a newspaper-covered desk, with Bessie and the
office-boy, on cold ham and beans and small, bright-colored cakes which
the boy brought in from a bakery. Sometimes she had boiled eggs and
cocoa at a Childs restaurant with stenographers who ate baked apples,
rich Napoleons, and, always, coffee. Sometimes at a cafeteria, carrying
a tray, she helped herself to crackers and milk and sandwiches.
Sometimes at the Arden Tea Room, for women only, she encountered
charity-workers and virulently curious literary ladies, whom she
endured for the marked excellence of the Arden chicken croquettes.
Sometimes Bessie tempted her to a Chinese restaurant, where Bessie, who
came from the East Side and knew a trick or two, did not order
chop-suey, like a tourist, but noodles and eggs foo-young.

In any case, the lunch-hour and the catalogue of what she was so vulgar
as to eat were of importance in Una's history, because that hour broke
the routine, gave her for an hour a deceptive freedom of will, of choice
between Boston beans and--New York beans. And her triumphant common
sense was demonstrated, for she chose light, digestible food, and kept
her head clear for the afternoon, while her overlord, Mr. Troy Wilkins,
like vast numbers of his fellow business men, crammed himself with
beefsteak-and-kidney pudding, drugged himself with cigar smoke and pots
of strong coffee and shop-talk, spoke earnestly of the wickedness of
drunkenness, and then, drunk with food and tobacco and coffee and talk,
came back dizzy, blur-eyed, slow-nerved; and for two hours tried to get
down to work.

After hours of trudging through routine, Una went home.

She took the Elevated now instead of the Subway. That was important in
her life. It meant an entire change of sce