the marks of two removed
partitions, its old iron fireplace stuffed with rubbers and overshoes
and crayon-boxes. As a provincial, Una disliked the many Jews among
them, and put down their fervor for any sort of learning to
acquisitiveness. The rest she came to despise for the clumsy slowness
with which they learned even the simplest lessons. And to all of them
she--who was going to be rich and powerful, directly she was good for
one hundred words a minute at stenography!--felt disdainfully superior,
because they were likely to be poor the rest of their lives.

In a twilight walk on Washington Heights, a walk of such vigor and happy
absorption with new problems as she had never known in Panama, she
caught herself being contemptuous about their frayed poverty. With a
sharp emotional sincerity, she rebuked herself for such sordidness,
mocked herself for assuming that she was already rich.

Even out of this mass of clerklings emerged two or three who were
interesting: Sam Weintraub, a young, active, red-headed, slim-waisted
Jew, who was born in Brooklyn. He smoked large cigars with an air, knew
how to wear his clothes, and told about playing tennis at the Prospect
Athletic Club. He would be a smart secretary or confidential clerk some
day, Una was certain; he would own a car and be seen in evening clothes
and even larger cigars at after-theater suppers. She was rather in awe
of his sophistication. He was the only man who made her feel like a
Freshman.

J. J. Todd, a reticent, hesitating, hard-working man of thirty, from
Chatham on Cape Cod. It was he who, in noon-time arguments, grimly
advocated profit-sharing, which Sam Weintraub debonairly dismissed as
"socialistic."

And, most appealing to her, enthusiastic young Sanford Hunt,
inarticulate, but longing for a chance to attach himself to some master.
Weintraub and Todd had desks on either side of her; they had that great
romantic virtue, propinquity. But Sanford Hunt she had noticed, in his
corner across the room, because he glanced about with such boyish
loneliness.

Sanford Hunt helped her find a rubber in the high-school-like coat-room
on a rainy day when the girls were giggling and the tremendous swells of
the institution were whooping and slapping one another on the back and
acting as much as possible like their ideal of college men--an ideal
presumably derived from motion pictures and college playlets in
vaudeville. Una saw J. J. Todd gawping at her, but not o