by the bartender
in the cafe. It is the women and children who are most dehumanized. The
children play in the corridors; they become bold and sophisticated; they
expect attention from strangers. At fourteen the girls have long dresses
and mature admirers, and the boys ape the manners of their shallow
elders and discuss brands of cigarettes. The women sit and rock,
empty-hearted and barren of hands. When they try to make individual
homes out of their fixed molds of rooms--the hard walls, the brass
bedsteads, the inevitable bureaus, the small rockers, and the transoms
that always let in too much light from the hall at night--then they are
only the more pathetic. For the small pictures of pulpy babies
photographed as cupids, the tin souvenirs and the pseudo-Turkish scarves
draped over trunks rob the rooms of the simplicity which is their only
merit.

For two years--two years snatched out of her life and traded for
somnambulatory peace, Una lived this spectral life of one room in a
family hotel on a side street near Sixth Avenue. The only other
dwelling-places she saw were the flats of friends of her husband.

He often said, with a sound of pride: "We don't care a darn for all
these would-be social climbers. The wife and I lead a regular Bohemian
life. We know a swell little bunch of live ones, and we have some pretty
nifty parties, lemme tell you, with plenty poker and hard liquor. And
one-two of the bunch have got their own cars--I tell you they make a
whole lot more coin than a lot of these society-column guys, even if
they don't throw on the agony; and we all pile in and go up to some
road-house, and sing, and play the piano, and have a real time."

Conceive Una--if through the fumes of cheap cigarettes you can make out
the low lights of her fading hair--sitting there, trying patiently to
play a "good, canny fist of poker"--which, as her husband often and
irritably assured her, she would never learn to do. He didn't, he said,
mind her losing his "good, hard-earned money," but he "hated to see
Eddie Schwirtz's own wife more of a boob than Mrs. Jock Sanderson, who's
a regular guy; plays poker like a man."

Mrs. Sanderson was a black-haired, big-bosomed woman with a face as hard
and smooth and expressionless as a dinner-plate, with cackling laughter
and a tendency to say, "Oh, hell, boys!" apropos of nothing. She was a
"good sport" and a "good mixer," Mr. Schwirtz averred; and more and
more, as the satisfaction of hav