f dome and
tower and factory chimney stood out like an Orient city.

"Oh, I want all this--it's mine!... An apartment up there--a big, broad
window-seat, and look out on all this. Oh, dear God," she was
unconsciously praying to her vague Panama Wesley Methodist Church God,
who gave you things if you were good, "I will work for all this.... And
for the little mother, dear mother that's never had a chance."

In the step of the slightly stolid girl there was a new lightness, a new
ecstasy in walking rapidly through the stirring New York air, as she
turned back to the Sessionses' flat.

Sec. 3

Later, when the streets fell into order and became normal, Una could
never quite identify the vaudeville theater to which the Sessionses took
them that evening. The gold-and-ivory walls of the lobby seemed to rise
immeasurably to a ceiling flashing with frescoes of light lovers in blue
and fluffy white, mincing steps and ardent kisses and flaunting
draperies. They climbed a tremendous arching stairway of marble, upon
which her low shoes clattered with a pleasant sound. They passed niches
hung with heavy curtains of plum-colored velvet, framing the sly peep of
plaster fauns, and came out on a balcony stretching as wide as the sea
at twilight, looking down on thousands of people in the orchestra below,
up at a vast golden dome lighted by glowing spheres hung with diamonds,
forward at a towering proscenic arch above which slim, nude goddesses in
bas-relief floated in a languor which obsessed her, set free the bare
brown laughing nymph that hides in every stiff Una in semi-mourning.

Nothing so diverting as that program has ever been witnessed. The funny
men with their solemn mock-battles, their extravagance in dress, their
galloping wit, made her laugh till she wanted them to stop. The singers
were bell-voiced; the dancers graceful as clouds, and just touched with
a beguiling naughtiness; and in the playlet there was a chill intensity
that made her shudder when the husband accused the wife whom he
suspected, oh, so absurdly, as Una indignantly assured herself.

The entertainment was pure magic, untouched by human clumsiness, rare
and spellbound as a stilly afternoon in oak woods by a lake.

They went to a marvelous cafe, and Mr. Sessions astounded them by the
urbanity with which he hurried captains and waiters and 'bus-boys, and
ordered lobster and coffee, and pretended that he was going to be wicked
and have wine and cigarette