an's simple longing for love and life. At twenty-four Una had half a
dozen times fancied herself in love. She had been embraced at a dance,
and felt the stirring of a desire for surrender. But always a native
shrewdness had kept her from agonizing over these affairs.

She was not--and will not be--a misunderstood genius, an undeveloped
artist, an embryonic leader in feminism, nor an ugly duckling who would
put on a Georgette hat and captivate the theatrical world. She was an
untrained, ambitious, thoroughly commonplace, small-town girl. But she
was a natural executive and she secretly controlled the Golden
household; kept Captain Golden from eating with his knife, and her
mother from becoming drugged with too much reading of poppy-flavored
novels.

She wanted to learn, learn anything. But the Goldens were too
respectable to permit her to have a job, and too poor to permit her to
go to college. From the age of seventeen, when she had graduated from
the high school--in white ribbons and heavy new boots and tight new
organdy--to twenty-three, she had kept house and gone to gossip-parties
and unmethodically read books from the town library--Walter Scott,
Richard Le Gallienne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mrs. Humphry Ward, _How to
Know the Birds_, _My Year in the Holy Land_, _Home Needlework_, _Sartor
Resartus_, and _Ships that Pass in the Night_. Her residue of knowledge
from reading them was a disbelief in Panama, Pennsylvania.

She was likely never to be anything more amazing than a mother and wife,
who would entertain the Honiton Embroidery Circle twice a year.

Yet, potentially, Una Golden was as glowing as any princess of balladry.
She was waiting for the fairy prince, though he seemed likely to be
nothing more decorative than a salesman in a brown derby. She was fluid;
indeterminate as a moving cloud.

Although Una Golden had neither piquant prettiness nor grave
handsomeness, her soft littleness made people call her "Puss," and want
to cuddle her as a child cuddles a kitten. If you noted Una at all, when
you met her, you first noted her gentle face, her fine-textured hair of
faded gold, and her rimless eye-glasses with a gold chain over her ear.
These glasses made a business-like center to her face; you felt that
without them she would have been too childish. Her mouth was as kind as
her spirited eyes, but it drooped. Her body was so femininely soft that
you regarded her as rather plump. But for all her curving hips, a