will go there when wife
or the cook is away, or they want to give a big dinner."

"It does sound like it had some possibilities," said Mr. Sidney, as she
stopped for breath, after quite the most impassioned invocation of her
life.

She plunged in again:

"Now the point of all this is that I want to be the general manager of
certain departments of the Line--catering, service, decoration, and so
on. I'll keep out of the financial end and we'll work out the buying
together. You know it's women who make the homes for people at home, and
why not the homes for people traveling?... I'm woman sales-manager for
Truax & Fein--sell direct, and six women under me. I'll show you my
record of sales. I've been secretary to an architect, and studied
architecture a little. And plenty other jobs. Now you take these
suggestions of mine to your office and study 'em over with your partner
and we'll talk about the job for me by and by."

She left him as quickly as she could, got back to her office, and in a
shaking spasm of weeping relapsed into the old, timorous Una.

Sec. 5

Tedious were the negotiations between Una and Mr. Sidney and his
partner. They wanted her to make their hotels--and yet they had never
heard of anything so nihilistic as actually having hotel "offices"
without "desks." They wanted her, and yet they "didn't quite know about
adding any more overhead at this stage of the game."

Meantime Una sold lots and studied the economical buying of hotel
supplies. She was always willing to go with Mr. Sidney and his partner
to lunch--but they were brief lunches. She was busy, she said, and she
had no time to "drop in at their office." When Mr. Sidney once tried to
hold her hand (not seriously, but with his methodical system of never
failing to look into any possibilities), she said, sharply, "Don't try
that--let's save a lot of time by understanding that I'm what you would
call 'straight.'" He apologized and assured her that he had known she
was a "high-class genuwine lady all the time."

The very roughness which, in Mr. Schwirtz, had abraised her, interested
her in Mr. Sidney. She knew better now how to control human beings. She
was fascinated by a comparison of her four average citizens--four men
not vastly varied as seen in a street-car, yet utterly different to one
working with them: Schwirtz, the lumbering; Troy Wilkins, the roaring;
Truax, the politely whining; and Bob Sidney, the hesitating.

The negotiations see