the dancers graceful as clouds, and just touched with a beguiling naughtiness; and in the playlet there was a chill intensity that made her shudder when the husband accused the wife whom he suspected, oh, so absurdly, as Una indignantly assured herself.
The entertainment was pure magic, untouched by human clumsiness, rare and spellbound as a stilly afternoon in oak woods by a lake.
They went to a marvelous café, and Mr. Sessions astounded them by the urbanity with which he hurried captains and waiters and ’bus-boys, and ordered lobster and coffee, and pretended that he was going to be wicked and have wine and cigarettes.
Months afterward, when she was going to vaudeville by herself, Una tried to identify the theater of wizardry, but she never could. The Sessionses couldn’t remember which theater it was; they thought it was the Pitt, but surely they must have been mistaken, for the Pitt was a shanty daubed with grotesque nudes, rambling and pretentious, with shockingly amateurish programs. And afterward, on the occasion or two when they went out to dinner with the Sessionses, it seemed to Una that Mr. Sessions was provincial in restaurants, too deprecatingly friendly with the waiters, too hesitating about choosing dinner.
4
Whiteside and Schleusner’s College of Commerce, where Una learned the art of business, occupied only five shabby rooms of crepuscular windows and perpetually dusty corners, and hard, glistening wall-paint, in a converted (but not sanctified) old dwelling-house on West Eighteenth Street. The faculty were six: Mr. Whiteside, an elaborate pomposity who smoothed his concrete brow as though he had a headache, and took obvious pride in being able to draw birds with Spencerian strokes. Mr. Schleusner, who was small and vulgar and déclassé and really knew something about business. A shabby man like a broken-down bookkeeper, silent and diligent and afraid. A towering man with a red face, who kept licking his lips with a small red triangle of tongue, and taught English — commercial college English — in a bombastic voice of finicky correctness, and always smelled of cigar smoke. An active young Jewish New-Yorker of wonderful black hair, elfin face, tilted hat, and smart clothes, who did something on the side in real estate. Finally, a thin widow, who was so busy and matter-of-fact that she was no more individualized than a street-car. Any one of them was considered competent to teach any “line,” and among them they ground out instruction in shorthand, typewriting, book-keeping, English grammar, spelling, composition (with a special view to the construction of deceptive epistles), and commercial geography. Once or twice a week, language-masters from a linguistic mill down the street were had in to chatter the more vulgar phrases of French, German, and Spanish.
A cluttered, wheezy omnibus of a school, but in it Una rode to spacious and beautiful hours of learning. It was even more to her than is the art-school to the yearner who has always believed that she has a talent for painting; for the yearner has, even as a child, been able to draw and daub and revel in the results; while for Una this was the first time in her life when her labor seemed to count for something. Her school-teaching had been a mere time-filler. Now she was at once the responsible head of the house and a seer of the future.
Most of the girls in the school learned nothing but shorthand and typewriting, but to these Una added English grammar, spelling, and letter-composition. After breakfast at the little flat which she had taken with her mother, she fled to the school. She drove into her books, she delighted in the pleasure of her weary teachers when she snapped out a quick answer to questions, or typed a page correctly, or was able to remember the shorthand symbol for a difficult word like “psychologize.”
Her belief in the sacredness of the game was boundless.
CHAPTER III
1
EXCEPT for the young man in the bank, the new young man in the hardware-store, and the proprietors of the new Broadway Clothing Shop, Una had known most of the gallants in Panama, Pennsylvania, from knickerbocker days; she remembered their bony, boyish knees and their school-day whippings too well to be romantic about them. But in the commercial college she was suddenly associated with seventy entirely new and interesting males. So brief were the courses, so irregular the classifications, that there was no spirit of seniority to keep her out of things; and Una, with her fever of learning, her instinctive common sense about doing things in the easiest way, stood out among the girl students. The young men did not buzz about her as they did about the slim, diabolic, star-eyed girl from Brooklyn, in her tempting low-cut blouses, or the intense, curly-headed, boyish, brown Jew girl, or the ardent dancers and gigglers. But Una’s self-sufficient eagerness gave a fervor to her blue eyes, and a tilt to her commonplace chin, which made her almost pretty, and the young men liked to consult her about things. She was really more prominent here, in a school of one hundred and seventy, than in her Panama high school with its enrolment of seventy.
Panama, Pennsylvania, had never regarded Una as a particularly capable young woman. Dozens of others were more masterful at trimming the Christmas tree for Wesley Methodist Church, preparing for the annual picnic of the Art Needlework Coterie, arranging a surprise donation party for the Methodist pastor, even spring house-cleaning. But she had been well spoken of as a marketer, a cook, a neighbor who would take care of your baby while you went visiting — because these tasks had seemed worth while to her. She was more practical than either Panama or herself believed. All these years she had, without knowing that she was philosophizing, without knowing that there was a world-wide inquiry into woman’s place, been trying to find work that needed her. Her father’s death had freed her; had permitted her to toil for her mother, cherish her, be regarded as useful. Instantly — still without learning that there was such a principle as feminism — she had become a feminist, demanding the world and all the fullness thereof as her field of labor.
And now, in this fumbling school, she was beginning to feel the theory of efficiency, the ideal of Big Business.
For “business,” that one necessary field of activity to which the egotistic arts and sciences and theologies and military puerilities are but servants, that long-despised and always valiant effort to unify the labor of the world, is at last beginning to be something more than dirty smithing. No longer does the business man thank the better classes for permitting him to make and distribute bread and motor-cars and books. No longer does he crawl to the church to buy pardon for usury. Business is being recognized — and is recognizing itself — as ruler of the world.
With this consciousness of power it is reforming its old, petty, half-hearted ways; its idea of manufacture as a filthy sort of tinkering; of distribution as chance peddling and squalid shopkeeping; it is feverishly seeking efficiency.... In its machinery.... But, like all monarchies, it must fail unless it becomes noble of heart. So long as capital and labor are divided, so long as the making of munitions or injurious food is regarded as business, so long as Big Business believes that it exists merely to enrich a few of the lucky or the well born or the nervously active, it will not be efficient, but deficient. But the vision of an efficiency so broad that it can be kindly and sure, is growing — is discernible at once in the scientific business man and the courageous labor-unionist.
That vision Una Golden feebly comprehended. Where she first beheld it cannot be said. Certainly not in the lectures of her teachers, humorless and unvisioned grinds, who droned that by divine edict letters must end with a “yours truly” one space to the left of the middle of the page; who sniffed at card-ledgers as new-fangled nonsense, and, at their most inspired, croaked out such platitudes as: “Look out for the pennies and the pounds will look out for themselves,” or “The man who fails is the man who watches the clock.”
Nor was the vision of the inspired Big Business that shall be, to be found in the books over which Una labored — the flat, maroon-covered, dusty, commercial geography, the arid book of phrases and rules-of-the-thumb called “Fish’s Commercial English,” the manual of touch-typewriting, or the shorthand primer that, with its grotesque symbols and numbered exercises and yellow pages dog-eared by many owners, looked like an old-fashioned Arabic grammar headachily perused in some divinity-school library.
Her vision of it all