s.

Months afterward, when she was going to vaudeville by herself, Una tried
to identify the theater of wizardry, but she never could. The Sessionses
couldn't remember which theater it was; they thought it was the Pitt,
but surely they must have been mistaken, for the Pitt was a shanty
daubed with grotesque nudes, rambling and pretentious, with shockingly
amateurish programs. And afterward, on the occasion or two when they
went out to dinner with the Sessionses, it seemed to Una that Mr.
Sessions was provincial in restaurants, too deprecatingly friendly with
the waiters, too hesitating about choosing dinner.

Sec. 4

Whiteside and Schleusner's College of Commerce, where Una learned the
art of business, occupied only five shabby rooms of crepuscular windows
and perpetually dusty corners, and hard, glistening wall-paint, in a
converted (but not sanctified) old dwelling-house on West Eighteenth
Street. The faculty were six: Mr. Whiteside, an elaborate pomposity who
smoothed his concrete brow as though he had a headache, and took
obvious pride in being able to draw birds with Spencerian strokes. Mr.
Schleusner, who was small and vulgar and _declasse_ and really knew
something about business. A shabby man like a broken-down bookkeeper,
silent and diligent and afraid. A towering man with a red face, who kept
licking his lips with a small red triangle of tongue, and taught
English--commercial college English--in a bombastic voice of finicky
correctness, and always smelled of cigar smoke. An active young Jewish
New-Yorker of wonderful black hair, elfin face, tilted hat, and smart
clothes, who did something on the side in real estate. Finally, a thin
widow, who was so busy and matter-of-fact that she was no more
individualized than a street-car. Any one of them was considered
competent to teach any "line," and among them they ground out
instruction in shorthand, typewriting, book-keeping, English grammar,
spelling, composition (with a special view to the construction of
deceptive epistles), and commercial geography. Once or twice a week,
language-masters from a linguistic mill down the street were had in to
chatter the more vulgar phrases of French, German, and Spanish.

A cluttered, wheezy omnibus of a school, but in it Una rode to spacious
and beautiful hours of learning. It was even more to her than is the
art-school to the yearner who has always believed that she has a talent
for painting; for the yearner has, even as