fteen dollars
a week. She was again merely his secretary, however, and the office
trudged through another normal period when all past drama seemed
incredible and all the future drab.

But Una was certain now that she could manage business, could wheedle
Bessies and face pompous vice-presidents and satisfy querulous Mr.
Wilkinses. She looked forward; she picked at architecture as portrayed
in Mr. Wilkins's big books; she learned the reason and manner of the
rows of semi-detached, semi-suburban, semi-comfortable, semi-cheap, and
somewhat less than semi-attractive houses.

She was not afraid of the office world now; she had a part in the city
and a home.

Sec. 2

She thought of Walter Babson. Sometimes, when Mrs. Lawrence was petulant
or the office had been unusually exhausting, she fancied that she
missed him. But instead of sitting and brooding over folded hands, in
woman's ancient fashion, she took a man's unfair advantage--she went up
to the gymnasium of the Home Club and worked with the chest-weights and
flying-rings--a solemn, happy, busy little figure. She laughed more
deeply, and she felt the enormous rhythm of the city, not as a menacing
roar, but as a hymn of triumph.

She could never be intimate with Mamie Magen as she was with the frankly
disillusioned Mrs. Lawrence; she never knew whether Miss Magen really
liked her or not; her smile, which transfigured her sallow face, was
equally bright for Una, for Mrs. Fike, and for beggars. Yet it was Miss
Magen whose faith in the purpose of the struggling world inspired Una.
Una walked with her up Madison Avenue, past huge old brownstone
mansions, and she was unconscious of suiting her own quick step to Miss
Magen's jerky lameness as the Jewess talked of her ideals of a business
world which should have generosity and chivalry and the accuracy of a
biological laboratory; in which there would be no need of charity to
employee.... Or to employer.

Mamie Magen was the most highly evolved person Una had ever known. Una
had, from books and newspapers and Walter Babson, learned that there
were such things as socialists and earnest pessimists, and the race
sketchily called "Bohemians"--writers and artists and social workers,
who drank claret and made love and talked about the free theater, all on
behalf of the brotherhood of man. Una pictured the socialists as always
attacking capitalists; the pessimists as always being bitter and
egotistic; Bohemians as always being d