d indicated Mr. Starr and Miss Vincent and laughed about
them till--

"Oh, Miss Golden, could you take a little dictation now?" Mr. Wilkins
called.

There was also a pile of correspondence unfiled, and the office supplies
were low, and Bessie was behind with her copying, and the office-boy had
let the place get as dusty as a hay-loft--and the stiff, old, gray
floor-rag was grimly at its post in the wash-room.

"The office _isn't_ changed," she said; and when she went out at three
for belated lunch, she added, "and New York isn't, either. Oh, Lord! I
really am back here. Same old hot streets. Don't believe there _are_ any
Berkshires; just seems now as though I hadn't been away at all."

She sat in negligee on the roof of the Home Club and learned that Rose
Larsen and Mamie Magen and a dozen others had just gone on vacation.

"Lord! it's over for me," she thought. "Fifty more weeks of the job
before I can get away again--a whole year. Vacation is farther from me
now than ever. And the same old grind.... Let's see, I've got to get in
touch with the Adine Company for Mr. Wilkins before I even do any filing
in the morning--"

She awoke, after midnight, and worried: "I _mustn't_ forget to get after
the Adine Company, the very first thing in the morning. And Mr. Wilkins
has _got_ to get Bessie and me a waste-basket apiece. Oh, Lord! I wish
Eddie Schwirtz were going to take me out for a walk to-morrow, the old
darling that he is-- I'd walk _anywhere_ rather than ask Mr. Wilkins for
those blame waste-baskets!"

CHAPTER XIV

Mrs. Esther Lawrence was, she said, bored by the general atmosphere of
innocent and bounding girlhood at the Temperance Home Club, and she
persuaded Una to join her in taking a flat--three small rooms--which
they made attractive with Japanese toweling and Russian, or at least
Russian-Jew, brassware. Here Mrs. Lawrence's men came calling, and
sometimes Mr. Julius Edward Schwirtz, and all of them, except Una
herself, had cigarettes and highballs, and Una confusedly felt that she
was getting to be an Independent Woman.

Then, in January, 1909, she left the stiff, gray scrub-rag which
symbolized the routine of Mr. Troy Wilkins's office.

In a magazine devoted to advertising she had read that Mr. S. Herbert
Ross, whom she had known as advertising-manager of the _Gas and Motor
Gazette_, had been appointed advertising-manager for Pemberton's--the
greatest manufactory of drugs and toilet articles