the Home Club; and they had a rose-lighted dinner when Livy Hedger
announced her engagement to a Newark lawyer.

Various were the Home Club women in training and work and ways; they
were awkward stenographers and dependable secretaries; fashion artists
and department-store clerks; telephone girls and clever college-bred
persons who actually read manuscripts and proof, and wrote captions or
household-department squibs for women's magazines--real editors, or at
least real assistant editors; persons who knew authors and illustrators,
as did the great Magen. They were attendants in dentists' offices and
teachers in night-schools and filing-girls and manicurists and cashiers
and blue-linen-gowned super-waitresses in artistic tea-rooms. And
cliques, caste, they did have. Yet their comradeship was very sweet,
quite real; the factional lines were not drawn according to salary or
education or family, but according to gaiety or sobriety or propriety.

Una was finding not only her lost boarding-school days, but her second
youth--perhaps her first real youth.

Though the questions inspired by the exceptional Miss Magen and the
defiant Mrs. Lawrence kept her restless, her association with the
play-girls, her growing acquaintanceship with women who were
easy-minded, who had friends and relatives and a place in the city, who
did not agonize about their jobs or their loves, who received young men
casually and looked forward to marriage and a comfortable flat in
Harlem, made Una feel the city as her own proper dwelling. Now she no
longer plodded along the streets wonderingly, a detached little
stranger; she walked briskly and contentedly, heedless of crowds,
returning to her own home in her own city. Most workers of the city
remain strangers to it always. But chance had made Una an insider.

It was another chapter in the making of a business woman, that spring of
happiness and new stirrings in the Home Club; it was another term in the
unplanned, uninstructed, muddling, chance-governed college which
civilization unwittingly keeps for the training of men and women who
will carry on the work of the world.

It passed swiftly, and July and vacation-time came to Una.

CHAPTER XIII

It was hard enough to get Mr. Wilkins to set a definite date for her
summer vacation; the time was delayed and juggled till Mrs. Lawrence,
who was to have gone with Una, had to set off alone. But it was even
harder for Una to decide where to go for h