a child, been able to draw
and daub and revel in the results; while for Una this was the first time
in her life when her labor seemed to count for something. Her
school-teaching had been a mere time-filler. Now she was at once the
responsible head of the house and a seer of the future.

Most of the girls in the school learned nothing but shorthand and
typewriting, but to these Una added English grammar, spelling, and
letter-composition. After breakfast at the little flat which she had
taken with her mother, she fled to the school. She drove into her books,
she delighted in the pleasure of her weary teachers when she snapped out
a quick answer to questions, or typed a page correctly, or was able to
remember the shorthand symbol for a difficult word like "psychologize."

Her belief in the sacredness of the game was boundless.

CHAPTER III

Except for the young man in the bank, the new young man in the
hardware-store, and the proprietors of the new Broadway Clothing Shop,
Una had known most of the gallants in Panama, Pennsylvania, from
knickerbocker days; she remembered their bony, boyish knees and their
school-day whippings too well to be romantic about them. But in the
commercial college she was suddenly associated with seventy entirely new
and interesting males. So brief were the courses, so irregular the
classifications, that there was no spirit of seniority to keep her out
of things; and Una, with her fever of learning, her instinctive common
sense about doing things in the easiest way, stood out among the girl
students. The young men did not buzz about her as they did about the
slim, diabolic, star-eyed girl from Brooklyn, in her tempting low-cut
blouses, or the intense, curly-headed, boyish, brown Jew girl, or the
ardent dancers and gigglers. But Una's self-sufficient eagerness gave a
fervor to her blue eyes, and a tilt to her commonplace chin, which made
her almost pretty, and the young men liked to consult her about things.
She was really more prominent here, in a school of one hundred and
seventy, than in her Panama high school with its enrolment of seventy.

Panama, Pennsylvania, had never regarded Una as a particularly capable
young woman. Dozens of others were more masterful at trimming the
Christmas tree for Wesley Methodist Church, preparing for the annual
picnic of the Art Needlework Coterie, arranging a surprise donation
party for the Methodist pastor, even spring house-cleaning. But she had
b