his was her formulated philosophy--the
commonplace creed of a commonplace woman in a rather less than
commonplace family hotel. The important thing was not the form of it,
but her resolve not to sink into nothingness.... She hoped that some day
she would get a job again. She sometimes borrowed a typewriter from the
manager of the hotel, and she took down in shorthand the miscellaneous
sermons--by Baptists, Catholics, Reformed rabbis, Christian Scientists,
theosophists, High Church Episcopalians, Hindu yogis, or any one else
handy--with which she filled up her dull Sundays.... Except as practice
in stenography she found their conflicting religions of little value to
lighten her life. The ministers seemed so much vaguer than the
hard-driving business men with whom she had worked; and the question of
what Joshua had done seemed to have little relation to what Julius
Schwirtz was likely to do. The city had come between her and the Panama
belief that somehow, mysteriously, one acquired virtue by enduring dull
sermons.

She depended more on her own struggle to make a philosophy.

That philosophy, that determination not to sink into paralyzed despair,
often broke down when her husband was in town, but she never gave up
trying to make it vital to her.

So, through month on month, she read, rocking slowly in the small,
wooden rocker, or lying on the coarse-coverleted bed, while round her
the hotel room was still and stale-smelling and fixed, and outside the
window passed the procession of life--trucks laden with crates of
garments consigned to Kansas City and Bangor and Seattle and Bemidji;
taxicabs with passengers for the mammoth hotels; office-girls and
policemen and salesmen and all the lusty crew that had conquered the
city or were well content to be conquered by it.

CHAPTER XVII

Late in the summer of 1912, at a time when Una did not expect the return
of her husband for at least three weeks, she was in their room in the
afternoon, reading "Salesmanship for Women," and ruminatively eating
lemon-drops from a small bag.

As though he were a betrayed husband dramatically surprising her, Mr.
Schwirtz opened the door, dropped a large suit-case, and stood, glaring.

"Well!" he said, with no preliminary, "so here you are! For once you
could--"

"Why, Ed! I didn't expect to see you for--"

He closed the door and gesticulated. "No! Of course you didn't. Why
ain't you out with some of your swell friends that I ain'