Collating Mrs. Truax and the matrons of the Visiting Board of the
Temperance Home Club, Una concluded that women trained in egotism, but
untrained in business, ought to be legally enjoined from giving their
views to young women on the job.

The most interesting figure in the office was Mr. Fein, the junior
partner, a Harvard Jew, who was perfectly the new type of business man.
Serious, tall, spectacled, clean-shaven, lean-faced, taking business as
a profession, and kindly justice as a religion, studying efficiency, but
hating the metamorphosis of clerks into machines, he was the distinction
and the power of Truax & Fein. At first Una had thought him humorless
and negligible, but she discovered that it was he who pulled Mr. Truax
out of his ruts, his pious trickeries, his cramping economies. She found
that Mr. Fein loved books and the opera, and that he could be boyish
after hours.

Then the sales-manager, that driving but festive soul, Mr. Charles
Salmond, whom everybody called "Chas."--pronounced "Chaaz"--a good soul
who was a little tiresome because he was so consistently an anthology of
New York. He believed in Broadway, the Follies, good clothes, a
motor-car, Palm Beach, and the value of the Salvation Army among the
lower classes. When Mr. Fein fought for real beauty in their suburban
developments it was Chas. who echoed all of New York by rebelling, "We
aren't in business for our health--this idealistic game is O. K. for the
guys that have the cash, but you can't expect my salesmen to sell this
Simplicity and High-Thinking stuff to prospects that are interested in
nothing but a sound investment with room for a garage and two kids."

Sixty or seventy salesmen, clerks, girls--these Una was beginning to
know.

Finally, there was a keen, wide-awake woman, willing to do anything for
anybody, not forward, but not to be overridden--a woman with a slight
knowledge of architecture and a larger knowledge of the way of
promotion; a woman whom Una took seriously; and the name of this paragon
was Mrs. Una Golden Schwirtz.

Round these human islands flowed a sea of others. She had a sense of
flux, and change, and energy; of hundreds of thousands of people rushing
about her always--crowds on Broadway and Fifth Avenue and Sixth, and on
Thirty-fourth Street, where stood the Zodiac Building in which was the
office. Crowds in the hall of the Zodiac Building, examining the
black-and-white directory board with its list of two hu