to give up her job, even if she did marry; the man who saw a future in these motion pictures; the shaggy-haired zealot who talked about profit-sharing (which was a bold radicalism back in 1905; almost as subversive of office discipline as believing in unions). Partly it came from the new sorts of business magazines for the man who didn’t, like his fathers, insist, “I guess I can run my business without any outside interference,” but sought everywhere for systems and charts and new markets and the scientific mind.
2
While her power of faith and vision was satisfied by the largeness of the city and by her chance to work, there was quickening in Una a shy, indefinable, inner life of tenderness and desire for love. She did not admit it, but she observed the young men about her with an interest that was as diverting as her ambition.
At first they awed her by their number and their strangeness. But when she seemed to be quite their equal in this school of the timorously clerical, she began to look at them level-eyed.... A busy, commonplace, soft-armed, pleasant, good little thing she was; glancing at them through eye-glasses attached to a gold chain over her ear, not much impressed now, slightly ashamed by the delight she took in winning their attention by brilliant recitations.... She decided that most of them were earnest-minded but intelligent serfs, not much stronger than the girls who were taking stenography for want of anything better to do. They sprawled and looked vacuous as they worked in rows in the big study-hall, with its hard blue walls showing the marks of two removed partitions, its old iron fireplace stuffed with rubbers and overshoes and crayon-boxes. As a provincial, Una disliked the many Jews among them, and put down their fervor for any sort of learning to acquisitiveness. The rest she came to despise for the clumsy slowness with which they learned even the simplest lessons. And to all of them she — who was going to be rich and powerful, directly she was good for one hundred words a minute at stenography! — felt disdainfully superior, because they were likely to be poor the rest of their lives.
In a twilight walk on Washington Heights, a walk of such vigor and happy absorption with new problems as she had never known in Panama, she caught herself being contemptuous about their frayed poverty. With a sharp emotional sincerity, she rebuked herself for such sordidness, mocked herself for assuming that she was already rich.
Even out of this mass of clerklings emerged two or three who were interesting: Sam Weintraub, a young, active, red-headed, slim-waisted Jew, who was born in Brooklyn. He smoked large cigars with an air, knew how to wear his clothes, and told about playing tennis at the Prospect Athletic Club. He would be a smart secretary or confidential clerk some day, Una was certain; he would own a car and be seen in evening clothes and even larger cigars at after-theater suppers. She was rather in awe of his sophistication. He was the only man who made her feel like a Freshman.
J. J. Todd, a reticent, hesitating, hard-working man of thirty, from Chatham on Cape Cod. It was he who, in noon-time arguments, grimly advocated profit-sharing, which Sam Weintraub debonairly dismissed as “socialistic.”
And, most appealing to her, enthusiastic young Sanford Hunt, inarticulate, but longing for a chance to attach himself to some master. Weintraub and Todd had desks on either side of her; they had that great romantic virtue, propinquity. But Sanford Hunt she had noticed, in his corner across the room, because he glanced about with such boyish loneliness.
Sanford Hunt helped her find a rubber in the high-school-like coat-room on a rainy day when the girls were giggling and the tremendous swells of the institution were whooping and slapping one another on the back and acting as much as possible like their ideal of college men — an ideal presumably derived from motion pictures and college playlets in vaudeville. Una saw J. J. Todd gawping at her, but not offering to help, while a foreshortened Sanford groped along the floor, under the dusty line of coats, for her missing left rubber. Sanford came up with the rubber, smiled like a nice boy, and walked with her to the Subway.
He didn’t need much encouragement to tell his ambitions. He was twenty-one — three years younger than herself. He was a semi-orphan, born in Newark; had worked up from office-boy to clerk in the office of a huge Jersey City paint company; had saved money to take a commercial course; was going back to the paint company, and hoped to be office-manager there. He had a conviction that “the finest man in the world” was Mr. Claude Lowry, president of the Lowry Paint Company; the next finest, Mr. Ernest Lowry, vice-president and general manager; the next, Mr. Julius Schwirtz, one of the two city salesmen — Mr. Schwirtz having occupied a desk next to his own for two years — and that “the best paint on the market to-day is Lowry’s Lasting Paint — simply no getting around it.”
In the five-minute walk over to the Eighteenth Street station of the Subway, Sanford had lastingly impressed Una by his devotion to the job; eager and faithful as the glory that a young subaltern takes in his regiment. She agreed with him that the dour J. J. Todd was “crazy” in his theories about profit-sharing and selling stocks to employees. While she was with young Sanford, Una found herself concurring that “the bosses know so much better about all those things — gee whiz! they’ve had so much more experience — besides you can’t expect them to give away all their profits to please these walking delegates or a Cape Cod farmer like Todd! All these theories don’t do a fellow any good; what he wants is to stick on a job and make good.”
Though, in keeping with the general school-boyishness of the institution, the study-room supervisors tried to prevent conversation, there was always a current of whispering and low talk, and Sam Weintraub gave Una daily reports of the tennis, the dances, the dinners at the Prospect Athletic Club. Her evident awe of his urban amusements pleased him. He told his former idol, the slim, blond giggler, that she was altogether too fresh for a Bronx Kid, and he basked in Una’s admiration. Through him she had a revelation of the New York in which people actually were born, which they took casually, as she did Panama.
She tried consciously to become a real New-Yorker herself. After lunch — her home-made lunch of sandwiches and an apple — which she ate in the buzzing, gossiping study-hall at noon-hour, she explored the city. Sometimes Sanford Hunt begged to go with her. Once Todd stalked along and embarrassed her by being indignant over an anti-socialist orator in Madison Square. Once, on Fifth Avenue, she met Sam Weintraub, and he nonchalantly pointed out, in a passing motor, a man whom he declared to be John D. Rockefeller.
Even at lunch-hour Una could not come to much understanding with the girls of the commercial college. They seemed alternately third-rate stenographers, and very haughty urbanites who knew all about “fellows” and “shows” and “glad rags.” Except for good-natured, square-rigged Miss Moynihan, and the oldish, anxious, industrious Miss Ingalls, who, like Una, came from a small town, and the adorably pretty little Miss Moore, whom you couldn’t help loving, Una saw the girls of the school only in a mass.
It was Sam Weintraub, J. J. Todd, and Sanford Hunt whom Una watched and liked, and of whom she thought when the school authorities pompously invited them all to a dance early in November.
3
The excitement, the giggles, the discussions of girdles and slippers and hair-waving and men, which filled the study-hall at noon and the coat-room at closing hour, was like midnight silence compared with the tumult in Una’s breast when she tried to make herself believe that either her blue satin evening dress or her white-and-pink frock of “novelty crêpe” was attractive enough for the occasion. The crêpe was the older, but she had worn the blue satin so much that now the crêpe suddenly seemed the newer, the less soiled. After discussions with her mother, which involved much holding up of the crêpe and the tracing of imaginary diagrams with a forefinger, she decided to put a new velvet girdle and new sleeve ruffles on the crêpe, and then she said, “It will have to do.”
Very different is the dressing of the girl who isn’t quite pretty, nor at all rich, from the luxurious joy which the beautiful woman takes in her new toilettes. Instead of the faint, shivery wonder as to whether men will realize how exquisitely the line of a new bodice accentuates the molding of her neck, the unpretty girl hopes that no one will observe how unevenly her dress hangs, how pointed and red and rough are her elbows, how clumsily waved her hair. “I don’t think anybody will notice,” she sighs, and is contemptuously conscious of her own stolid, straight, healthy waist, while her mother flutters