er vacation.

There was no accumulation of places which she had fervently been
planning to see. Indeed, Una wasn't much interested in any place besides
New York and Panama; and of the questions and stale reminiscences of
Panama she was weary. She decided to go to a farm in the Berkshires
largely because she had overheard a girl in the Subway say that it was a
good place.

When she took the train she was brave with a new blue suit, a new
suit-case, a two-pound box of candy, copies of the _Saturday Evening
Post_ and the _Woman's Home Companion_, and Jack London's _People of the
Abyss_, which Mamie Magen had given her. All the way to Pittsfield, all
the way out to the farm by stage, she sat still and looked politely at
every large detached elm, every cow or barefoot boy.

She had set her methodical mind in order; had told herself that she
would have time to think and observe. Yet if a census had been taken of
her thoughts, not sex nor economics, not improving observations of the
flora and fauna of western Massachusetts, would have been found, but a
half-glad, half-hysterical acknowledgment that she had not known how
tired and office-soaked she was till now, when she had relaxed, and a
dull, recurrent wonder if two weeks would be enough to get the office
poison out of her body. Now that she gave up to it, she was so nearly
sick that she couldn't see the magic of the sheer green hillsides and
unexpected ponds, the elm-shrined winding road, towns demure and white.
She did not notice the huge, inn-like farm-house, nor her bare room, nor
the noisy dining-room. She sat on the porch, exhausted, telling herself
that she was enjoying the hill's slope down to a pond that was yet
bright as a silver shield, though its woody shores had blurred into soft
darkness, the enchantment of frog choruses, the cooing pigeons in the
barn-yard.

"Listen. A cow mooing. Thank the Lord I'm away from New York--clean
forgotten it--might be a million miles away!" she assured herself.

Yet all the while she continued to picture the office--Bessie's desk,
Mr. Wilkins's inkwell, the sinister gray scrub-rag in the wash-room, and
she knew that she needed some one to lure her mind from the office.

She was conscious that some man had left the chattering rocking-chair
group at the other end of the long porch and had taken the chair beside
her.

"Miss Golden!" a thick voice hesitated.

"Yes."

"Say, I thought it was you. Well, well, the world's prett