ted in mid-December, but
had come back for "class commencement"; and at the last moment she
hesitated so long over J. J. Todd's hints about calling some day, that
he was discouraged and turned away. Una glanced about the
study-hall--the first place where she had ever been taken seriously as a
worker--and marched off to her first battle in the war of business.

CHAPTER IV

Sanford Hunt telephoned to Una that he and Mr. Julius Edward
Schwirtz--whom he called "Eddie"--had done their best to find an
"opening" for her in the office of the Lowry Paint Company, but that
there was no chance.

The commercial college gave her the names of several possible employers,
but they all wanted approximate perfection at approximately nothing a
week. After ten days of panic-stricken waiting at the employment office
of a typewriter company, and answering want advertisements, the
typewriter people sent her to the office of the _Motor and Gas Gazette_,
a weekly magazine for the trade. In this atmosphere of the literature of
lubricating oil and drop forgings and body enamels, as an
eight-dollar-a-week copyist, Una first beheld the drama and romance of
the office world.

Sec. 2

There is plenty of romance in business. Fine, large, meaningless,
general terms like romance and business can always be related. They take
the place of thinking, and are highly useful to optimists and lecturers.

But in the world of business there is a bewildered new Muse of Romance,
who is clad not in silvery tissue of dreams, but in a neat blue suit
that won't grow too shiny under the sleeves.

Adventure now, with Una, in the world of business; of offices and jobs
and tired, ordinary people who know such reality of romance as your
masquerading earl, your shoddy Broadway actress, or your rosily amorous
dairy-maid could never imagine. The youths of poetry and of the modern
motor-car fiction make a long diversion of love; while the sleezy-coated
office-man who surprises a look of humanness in the weary eyes of the
office-woman, knows that he must compress all the wonder of madness into
five minutes, because the Chief is prowling about, glancing meaningly at
the little signs that declare, "Your time is your employer's money;
don't steal it."

A world is this whose noblest vista is composed of desks and
typewriters, filing-cases and insurance calendars, telephones, and the
bald heads of men who believe dreams to be idiotic. Here, no galleon
breasts the