who sniffed at card-ledgers as new-fangled nonsense, and, at their most
inspired, croaked out such platitudes as: "Look out for the pennies and
the pounds will look out for themselves," or "The man who fails is the
man who watches the clock."

Nor was the vision of the inspired Big Business that shall be, to be
found in the books over which Una labored--the flat, maroon-covered,
dusty, commercial geography, the arid book of phrases and
rules-of-the-thumb called "Fish's Commercial English," the manual of
touch-typewriting, or the shorthand primer that, with its grotesque
symbols and numbered exercises and yellow pages dog-eared by many
owners, looked like an old-fashioned Arabic grammar headachily perused
in some divinity-school library.

Her vision of it all must have come partly from the eager talk of a few
of the students--the girl who wasn't ever going to give up her job, even
if she did marry; the man who saw a future in these motion pictures;
the shaggy-haired zealot who talked about profit-sharing (which was a
bold radicalism back in 1905; almost as subversive of office discipline
as believing in unions). Partly it came from the new sorts of business
magazines for the man who didn't, like his fathers, insist, "I guess I
can run my business without any outside interference," but sought
everywhere for systems and charts and new markets and the scientific
mind.

Sec. 2

While her power of faith and vision was satisfied by the largeness of
the city and by her chance to work, there was quickening in Una a shy,
indefinable, inner life of tenderness and desire for love. She did not
admit it, but she observed the young men about her with an interest that
was as diverting as her ambition.

At first they awed her by their number and their strangeness. But when
she seemed to be quite their equal in this school of the timorously
clerical, she began to look at them level-eyed.... A busy, commonplace,
soft-armed, pleasant, good little thing she was; glancing at them
through eye-glasses attached to a gold chain over her ear, not much
impressed now, slightly ashamed by the delight she took in winning their
attention by brilliant recitations.... She decided that most of them
were earnest-minded but intelligent serfs, not much stronger than the
girls who were taking stenography for want of anything better to do.
They sprawled and looked vacuous as they worked in rows in the big
study-hall, with its hard blue walls showing