hat she don't think he can
support her!"

And he meant it.

She saw that, felt his resentment. But she more and more often invited
an ambition to go back to work, to be independent and busy, no matter
how weary she might become. To die, if need be, in the struggle.
Certainly that death would be better than being choked in muck.... One
of them would have to go to work, anyway.

She discovered that an old acquaintance of his had offered him an
eighteen-dollar-a-week job as a clerk in a retail paint-shop, till he
should find something better. Mr. Schwirtz was scornful about it, and
his scorn, which had once intimidated Una, became grotesquely absurd to
her.

Then the hotel-manager came with a curt ultimatum: "Pay up or get out,"
he said.

Mr. Schwirtz spent an hour telephoning to various acquaintances, trying
to raise another hundred dollars. He got the promise of fifty. He
shaved, put on a collar that for all practical purposes was quite clean,
and went out to collect his fifty as proudly as though he had earned it.

Una stared at herself in the mirror over the bureau, and said, aloud: "I
don't believe it! It isn't you, Una Golden, that worked, and paid your
debts. You can't, dear, you simply _can't_ be the wife of a man who
lives by begging--a dirty, useless, stupid beggar. Oh, no, no! You
wouldn't do that--you _couldn't_ marry a man like that simply because
the job had exhausted you. Why, you'd die at work first. Why, if you
married him for board and keep, you'd be a prostitute--you'd be marrying
him just because he was a 'good provider.' And probably, when he didn't
provide any more, you'd be quitter enough to leave him--maybe for
another man. You couldn't do that. I don't believe life could bully you
into doing that.... Oh, I'm hysterical; I'm mad. I can't believe I am
what I am--and yet I am!... Now he's getting that fifty and buying a
drink--"

Sec. 4

Mr. Schwirtz actually came home with forty-five out of the fifty intact.
That was because he wanted to be able to pay the hotel-manager and
insultingly inform him that they were going to leave.... The manager
bore up under the blow.... They did move to a "furnished
housekeeping-room" on West Nineteenth Street--in the very district of
gray rooms and pathetic landladies where Una had sought a boarding-house
after the death of her mother.

As furnished housekeeping-rooms go, theirs was highly superior. Most of
them are carpetless, rusty and small of coal-s