sweet as himself, but
mute, smiling instead of speaking, inclined to admire every one, without
much discrimination. Sanford was very proud, very eager as host, and his
boyish admiration of all his guests gave a certain charm to the corner
of the crude German sausage-and-schnitzel restaurant where they lunched.
Una worked at making the party as successful as possible, and was
cordial to Mr. Julius Edward Schwirtz, the paint salesman.

Mr. Schwirtz was forty or forty-one, a red-faced, clipped-mustached,
derby-hatted average citizen. He was ungrammatical and jocose; he panted
a good deal and gurgled his soup; his nails were ragged-edged, his
stupid brown tie uneven, and there were signs of a growing grossness and
fatty unwieldiness about his neck, his shoulders, his waist. But he was
affable. He quietly helped Sanford in ordering lunch, to the great
economy of embarrassment. He was smilingly ready to explain to Una how a
paint company office was run; what chances there were for a girl. He
seemed to know his business, he didn't gossip, and his heavy,
coarse-lipped smile was almost sweet when he said to Una, "Makes a
hard-cased old widower like me pretty lonely to see this nice kid and
girly here. Eh? Wish I had some children like them myself."

He wasn't vastly different from Henry Carson, this Mr. Schwirtz, but he
had a mechanical city smartness in his manner and a jocular energy which
the stringy-necked Henry quite lacked.

Because she liked to be with Sanford Hunt, hoped to get from Mr. Julius
Edward Schwirtz still more of the feeling of how actual business men do
business, she hoped for another lunch.

But a crisis unexpected and alarming came to interrupt her happy
progress to a knowledge of herself and men.

Sec. 5

The Goldens had owned no property in Panama, Pennsylvania; they had
rented their house. Captain Lew Golden, who was so urgent in advising
others to purchase real estate--with a small, justifiable commission to
himself--had never quite found time to decide on his own real-estate
investments. When they had come to New York, Una and her mother had
given up the house and sold the heavier furniture, the big beds, the
stove. The rest of the furniture they had brought to the city and
installed in a little flat way up on 148th Street.

Her mother was, Una declared, so absolutely the lady that it was a
crying shame to think of her immured here in their elevatorless
tenement; this new, clean, barren buildi