ill two. She moved about the room quietly,
but Una awoke.

"I'm _glad_ I went with him," Mrs. Lawrence said, angrily, as though she
were defending herself.

Una asked no questions, but her good little heart was afraid. Though she
retained her joy in Mrs. Lawrence's willingness to take her and her job
seriously, Una was dismayed by Mrs. Lawrence's fiercely uneasy interest
in men.... She resented the insinuation that the sharp, unexpected
longing to feel Walter's arms about her might be only a crude physical
need for a man, instead of a mystic fidelity to her lost love.

Being a lame marcher, a mind which was admittedly "shocked at each
discovery of the aliveness of theory," Una's observation of the stalking
specter of sex did not lead her to make any very lucid conclusions about
the matter. But she did wonder a little if this whole business of
marriages and marriage ceremonies and legal bonds which any clerkly
pastor can gild with religiosity was so sacred as she had been informed
in Panama. She wondered a little if Mrs. Lawrence's obvious requirement
of man's companionship ought to be turned into a sneaking theft of love.
Una Golden was not a philosopher; she was a workaday woman. But into her
workaday mind came a low light from the fire which was kindling the
world; the dual belief that life is too sacred to be taken in war and
filthy industries and dull education; and that most forms and
organizations and inherited castes are not sacred at all.

Sec. 4

The aspirations of Mamie Magen and the alarming frankness of Mrs.
Lawrence were not all her life at the Home Club. With pretty Rose Larsen
and half a dozen others she played. They went in fluttering, beribboned
parties to the theater; they saw visions at symphony concerts, and
slipped into exhibits of contemporary artists at private galleries on
Fifth Avenue. When spring came they had walking parties in Central Park,
in Van Cortlandt Park, on the Palisades, across Staten Island, and
picnicked by themselves or with neat, trim-minded, polite men clerks
from the various offices and stores where the girls worked. They had a
perpetual joy in annoying Mrs. Fike by parties on fire-escapes, by
lobster Newburgh suppers at midnight. They were discursively excited
for a week when Rose Larsen was followed from the surface-car to the
door by an unknown man; and they were unhappily excited when, without
explanations, slim, daring Jennie Cassavant was suddenly asked to leave