ictures in a new magazine, of drifting
into slumber--not of stepping into a necessary sleep that was only the
anteroom of another day's labor....

Such was her greatest joy in this period of uneventfulness.

Sec. 5

Una was, she hoped, "trying to think about things." Naturally, one who
used that boarding-house phrase could not think transformingly.

She wasn't illuminative about Romain Rolland or Rodin or village
welfare. She was still trying to decide whether the suffrage movement
was ladylike and whether Dickens or Thackeray was the better novelist.
But she really was trying to decide.

She compiled little lists of books to read, "movements" to investigate.
She made a somewhat incoherent written statement of what she was trying
to do, and this she kept in her top bureau drawer, among the ribbons,
collars, imitation pearl necklaces, handkerchiefs, letters from Walter,
and photographs of Panama and her mother.

She took it out sometimes, and relieved the day's accumulated suffering
by adding such notes as:

"Be nice & human w. employes if ever have any of own; office wretched
hole anyway bec. of econ. system; W. used to say, why make worse by
being cranky."

Or:

"Study music, it brings country and W. and poetry and everything; take
piano les. when get time."

So Una tramped, weary always at dusk, but always recreated at dawn,
through one of those periods of timeless, unmarked months, when all
drama seems past and unreal and apparently nothing will ever happen
again.

Then, in one week, everything became startling--she found melodrama and
a place of friendship.

CHAPTER XI

"I'm tired of the Grays. They're very nice people, but they can't talk,"
said Una to Bessie Kraker, at lunch in the office, on a February day.

"How do yuh mean 'can't talk'? Are they dummies?" inquired Bessie.

"Dummies?"

"Yuh, sure, deef and dumb."

"Why, no, I mean they don't talk my language--they don't, oh, they
don't, I suppose you'd say 'conversationalize.' Do you see?"

"Oh yes," said Bessie, doubtfully. "Say, listen, Miss Golden. Say, I
don't want to butt in, and maybe you wouldn't be stuck on it much, but
they say it's a dead-swell place to live--Miss Kitson, the boss's
secretary where I was before, lived there--"

"Say, for the love o' Mike, _say_ it: _Where?_" interrupted the
office-boy.

"You shut your nasty trap. I was just coming to it. The Temperance and
Protection Home, on Madison Avenue just ab