text:
The Job (Lewis)/The Office/Chapter 11

I’M tired of the Grays. They’re very nice people, but they can’t talk,” said Una to Bessie Kraker, at lunch in the office, on a February day.

“How do yuh mean ‘can’t talk’? Are they dummies?” inquired Bessie.

“Dummies?”

“Yuh, sure, deef and dumb.”

“Why, no, I mean they don’t talk my language—they don’t, oh, they don’t, I suppose you’d say ‘conversationalize.’ Do you see?”

“Oh yes,” said Bessie, doubtfully. “Say, listen, Miss Golden. Say, I don’t want to butt in, and maybe you wouldn’t be stuck on it much, but they say it’s a dead-swell place to live—Miss Kitson, the boss’s secretary where I was before, lived there—”

“Say, for the love o’ Mike, say it: Where?” interrupted the office-boy.

“You shut your nasty trap. I was just coming to it. The Temperance and Protection Home, on Madison Avenue just above Thirty-fourth. They say it’s kind of strict, but, gee! there’s a’ ausgezeichnet bunch of dames there, artists and everything, and they say they feed you swell, and it only costs eight bucks a week.”

“Well, maybe I’ll look at it,” said Una, dubiously.

Neither the forbidding name nor Bessie’s moral recommendation made the Home for Girls sound tempting, but Una was hungry for companionship; she was cold now toward the unvarying, unimaginative desires of men. Among the women “artists and everything” she might find the friends she needed.

The Temperance and Protection Home Club for Girls was in a solemn, five-story, white sandstone structure with a severe doorway of iron grill, solid and capable-looking as a national bank. Una rang the bell diffidently. She waited in a hall that, despite its mission settee and red-tiled floor, was barrenly clean as a convent. She was admitted to the business-like office of Mrs. Harriet Fike, the matron of the Home.

Mrs. Fike had a brown, stringy neck and tan bangs. She wore a mannish coat and skirt, flat shoes of the kind called “sensible” by everybody except pretty women, and a large silver-mounted crucifix.

“Well?” she snarled.

“Some one— I’d like to find out about coming here to live—to see the place, and so on. Can you have somebody show me one of the rooms?”

“My dear young lady, the first consideration isn’t to ‘have somebody show you’ or anybody else a room, but to ascertain if you are a fit person to come here.”

Mrs. Fike jabbed at a compartment of her desk, yanked out a corduroy-bound book, boxed its ears, slammed it open, glared at Una in a Christian and Homelike way, and began to shoot questions:

“Whatcha name?”

“Una Golden.”

“Miss uh Miss?”

“I didn’t quite—”

“Miss or Mrs., I said. Can’t you understand English?”

“See here, I’m not being sent to jail that I know of!” Una rose, tremblingly.

Mrs. Fike merely waited and snapped: “Sit down. You look as though you had enough sense to understand that we can’t let people we don’t know anything about enter a decent place like this.... Miss or Mrs., I said?”

“Miss,” Una murmured, feebly sitting down again.

“What’s your denomination?... No agnostics or Catholics allowed!”

Una heard herself meekly declaring, “Methodist.”

“Smoke? Swear? Drink liquor? Got any bad habits?”

“No!”

“Got a lover, sweetheart, gentleman friend? If so, what name or names?”

“No.”

“That’s what they all say. Let me tell you that later, when you expect to have all these male cousins visit you, we’ll reserve the privilege to ask questions.... Ever served a jail sentence?”

“Now really—! Do I look it?”

“My dear miss, wouldn’t you feel foolish if I said ‘yes’? Have you? I warn you we look these things up!”

“No, I have not.”

“Well, that’s comforting.... Age?”

“Twenty-six.”

“Parents living? Name nearest relatives? Nearest friends? Present occupation?”

Even as she answered this last simple question and Mrs. Fike’s suspicious query about her salary, Una felt as though she were perjuring herself, as though there were no such place as Troy Wilkins’s office—and Mrs. Fike knew it; as though a large policeman were secreted behind the desk and would at any moment pop out and drag her off to jail. She answered with tremorous carefulness. By now, the one thing that she wanted to do was to escape from that Christian and strictly supervised Napoleon, Mrs. Fike, and flee back to the Grays.

“Previous history?” Mrs. Fike was grimly continuing, and she followed this question by ascertaining Una’s ambitions, health, record for insanity, and references.

Mrs. Fike closed the query-book, and observed:

“Well, you are rather fresh, but you seem to be acceptable—and now you may look us over and see whether we are acceptable to you. Don’t think for one moment that this institution needs you, or is trying to lift you out of a life of sin, or that we suppose this to be the only place in New York to live. We know what we want—we run things on a scientific basis—but we aren’t so conceited as to think that everybody likes us. Now, for example, I can see that you don’t like me and my ways one bit. But Lord love you, that isn’t necessary. The one thing necessary is for me to run this Home according to the book, and if you’re fool enough to prefer a slap-dash boarding-house to this hygienic Home, why, you’ll make your bed—or rather some slattern of a landlady will make it—and you can lie in it. Come with me. No; first read the rules.”

Una obediently read that the young ladies of the Temperance Home were forbidden to smoke, make loud noises, cook, or do laundry in their rooms, sit up after midnight, entertain visitors “of any sort except mothers and sisters” in any place in the Home, “except in the parlors for that purpose provided.” They were not permitted to be out after ten unless their names were specifically entered in the “Out-late Book” before their going. And they were “requested to answer all reasonable questions of matron, or board of visitors, or duly qualified inspectors, regarding moral, mental, physical, and commercial well-being and progress.”

Una couldn’t resist asking, “I suppose it isn’t forbidden to sleep in our rooms, is it?”

Mrs. Fike looked over her, through her, about her, and remarked: “I’d advise you to drop all impudence. You see, you don’t do it well. We admit East Side Jews here and they are so much quicker and wittier than you country girls from Pennsylvania and Oklahoma, and Heaven knows where, that you might just as well give up and try to be ladies instead of humorists. Come, we will take a look at the Home.”

By now Una was resolved not to let Mrs. Fike drive her away. She would “show her”; she would “come and live here just for spite.”

What Mrs. Fike thought has not been handed down.

She led Una past a series of closets, each furnished with two straight chairs on either side of a table, a carbon print of a chilly-looking cathedral, and a slice of carpet on which one was rather disappointed not to find the label, “Bath Mat.”

“These are the reception-rooms where the girls are allowed to receive callers. Any time—up to a quarter to ten,” Mrs. Fike said.

Una decided that they were better fitted for a hair-dressing establishment.

The living-room was her first revelation of the Temperance Home as something besides a prison—as an abiding-place for living, eager, sensitive girls. It was not luxurious, but it had been arranged by some one who made allowance for a weakness for pretty things, even on the part of young females observing the rules in a Christian home. There was a broad fireplace, built-in book-shelves, a long table; and, in wicker chairs with chintz cushions, were half a dozen curious girls. Una was sure that one of them, a fizzy-haired, laughing girl, secretly nodded to her, and she was comforted.

Up the stairs to a marvelous bathroom with tempting shower-baths, a small gymnasium, and, on the roof, a garden and loggia and basket-ball court. It was cool and fresh up here, on even the hottest summer evenings, and here the girls were permitted to lounge in negligées till after ten, Mrs. Fike remarked, with a half-smile.

Una smiled back.

As they went through the bedroom floors, with Mrs. Fike stalking ahead, a graceful girl in lace cap and negligée came bouncing out of a door between them, drew herself up and saluted Mrs. Fike’s back, winked at Una amicably, and for five steps imitated Mrs. Fike’s aggressive stride.

“Yes, I would be glad to come here!” Una said, cheerfully, to Mrs. Fike, who looked at her suspiciously, but granted: “Well, we’ll look up your references. Meantime, if you like—or don’t like, I suppose—you might talk to a Mrs. Esther Lawrence, who wants a room-mate.”

“Oh, I don’t think I’d like a room-mate.”

“My dear young lady, this place is simply full of young persons who would like and they wouldn’t like—and forsooth we must change every plan to suit their high and mighty convenience! I’m not at all sure that we shall have a single room vacant for at least six months, and of course—”

“Well, could I talk to Mrs.—Lawrence, was it?”

“Most assuredly. I expect you to talk to her! Come with me.”

Una followed abjectly, and the matron seemed well pleased with her reformation of this wayward young woman. Her voice was curiously anemic, however, as she rapped on a bedroom door and called, “Oh, Mrs. Lawrence!”

A husky, capable voice within, “Yeah, what is’t?”

“It’s Mrs. Fike, deary. I think I have a room-mate for you.”

“Well, you wait’ll I get something on, will you!”

Mrs. Fike waited. She waited two minutes. She looked at a wrist-watch in a leather band while she tapped her sensibly clad foot. She tried again: “We’re waiting, deary!”

There was no answer from within, and it was two minutes more before the door was opened.

Una was conscious of a room pleasant with white-enameled woodwork; a denim-covered couch and a narrow, prim brass bed, a litter of lingerie and sheets of newspaper; and, as the dominating center of it all, a woman of thirty, tall, high-breasted, full-faced, with a nose that was large but pleasant, black eyes that were cool and direct and domineering—Mrs. Esther Lawrence.

“You kept us waiting so long,” complained Mrs. Fike.

Mrs. Lawrence stared at her as though she were an impudent servant. She revolved on Una, and with a self-confident kindliness in her voice, inquired, “What’s your name, child?”

“Una Golden.”

“We’ll talk this over.... Thank you, Mrs. Fike.”

“Well, now,” Mrs. Fike endeavored, “be sure you both are satisfied—”

“Don’t you worry! We will, all right!”

Mrs. Fike glared at her and retired.

Mrs. Lawrence grinned, stretched herself on the couch, mysteriously produced a cigarette, and asked, “Smoke?”

“No, thanks.”

“Sit down, child, and be comfy. Oh, would you mind opening that window? Not supposed to smoke.... Poor Ma Fike—I just can’t help deviling her. Please don’t think I’m usually as nasty as I am with her. She has to be kept in her place or she’ll worry you to death.... Thanks.... Do sit down—woggle up the pillow on the bed and be comfy.... You look like a nice kid—me, I’m a lazy, slatternly, good-natured old hex, with all the bad habits there are and a profound belief that the world is a hell of a place, but I’m fine to get along with, and so let’s take a shot at rooming together. If we scrap, we can quit instanter, and no bad feelings.... I’d really like to have you come in, because you look as though you were on, even if you are rather meek and kitteny; and I’m scared to death they’ll wish some tough little Mick on to me, or some pious sister who hasn’t been married and believes in pussy-footing around and taking it all to God in prayer every time I tell her the truth.... What do you think, kiddy?”

Una was by this cock-sure disillusioned, large person more delighted than by all the wisdom of Mr. Wilkins or the soothing of Mrs. Sessions. She felt that, except for Walter, it was the first time since she had come to New York that she had found an entertaining person.

“Yes,” she said, “do let’s try it.”

“Good! Now let me warn you first off, that I may be diverting at times, but I’m no good. To-morrow I’ll pretend to be a misused and unfortunate victim, but your young and almost trusting eyes make me feel candid for about fifteen minutes. I certainly got a raw deal from my beloved husband—that’s all you’ll hear from me about him. By the way, I’m typical of about ten thousand married women in business about whose noble spouses nothing is ever said. But I suppose I ought to have bucked up and made good in business (I’m a bum stenog. for Pitcairn, McClure & Stockley, the bond house). But I can’t. I’m too lazy, and it doesn’t seem worth while.... And, oh, we are exploited, women who are on jobs. The bosses give us a lot of taffy and raise their hats—but they don’t raise our wages, and they think that if they keep us till two G.M. taking dictation they make it all right by apologizing. Women are a lot more conscientious on jobs than men are—but that’s because we’re fools; you don’t catch the men staying till six-thirty because the boss has shystered all afternoon and wants to catch up on his correspondence. But we—of course we don’t dare to make dates for dinner, lest we have to stay late. We don’t dare!”

“I bet you do!”

“Yes—well, I’m not so much of a fool as some of the rest—or else more of a one. There’s Mamie Magen—she’s living here; she’s with Pitcairn, too. You’ll meet her and be crazy about her. She’s a lame Jewess, and awfully plain, except she’s got lovely eyes, but she’s got a mind like a tack. Well, she’s the little angel-pie about staying late, and some day she’ll probably make four thousand bucks a year. She’ll be mayor of New York, or executive secretary of the Young Women’s Atheist Association or something. But still, she doesn’t stay late and plug hard because she’s scared, but because she’s got ambition. But most of the women—Lord! they’re just cowed sheep.”

“Yes,” said Una.

A million discussions of Women in Business going on—a thousand of them at just that moment, perhaps—men employers declaring that they couldn’t depend on women in their offices, women asserting that women were the more conscientious. Una listened and was content; she had found some one with whom to play, with whom to talk and hate the powers.... She felt an impulse to tell Mrs. Lawrence all about Troy Wilkins and her mother and—and perhaps even about Walter Babson. But she merely treasured up the thought that she could do that some day, and politely asked:

“What about Mrs. Fike? Is she as bad as she seems?”

“Why, that’s the best little skeleton of contention around here. There’s three factions. Some girls say she’s just plain devil—mean as a floor-walker. That’s what I think—she’s a rotter and a four-flusher. You notice the way she crawls when I stand up to her. Why, they won’t have Catholics here, and I’m one of those wicked people, and she knows it! When she asked my religion I told her I was a ‘Romanist Episcopalian,’ and she sniffed and put me down as an Episcopalian—I saw her!... Then some of the girls think she’s really good-hearted—just gruff—bark worse than her bite. But you ought to see how she barks at some of the younger girls—scares’em stiff—and keeps picking on them about regulations—makes their lives miserable. Then there’s a third section that thinks she’s merely institutionalized—training makes her as hard as any other kind of a machine. You’ll find lots like her in this town—in all the charities.”

“But the girls—they do have a good time here?”

“Yes, they do. It’s sort of fun to fight Ma Fike and all the fool rules. I enjoy smoking here twice as much as I would anywhere else. And Fike isn’t half as bad as the board of visitors—bunch of fat, rich, old Upper-West-Siders with passementeried bosoms, doing tea-table charity, and asking us impertinent questions, and telling a bunch of hard-worked slaves to be virtuous and wash behind their ears—the soft, ignorant, conceited, impractical parasites! But still, it’s all sort of like a cranky boarding-school for girls—and you know what fun the girls have there, with midnight fudge parties and a teacher pussy-footing down the hall trying to catch them.”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been to one.”

“Well—doesn’t matter.... Another thing—some day, when you come to know more men— Know many?”

“Very few.”

“Well, you’ll find this town is full of bright young men seeking an economical solution of the sex problem—to speak politely—and you’ll find it a relief not to have them on your door-step.’S safe here.... Come in with me, kid. Give me an audience to talk to.”

“Yes,” said Una.

§ 2

It was hard to leave the kindly Herbert Grays of the flat, but Una made the break and arranged all her silver toilet-articles—which consisted of a plated-silver hair-brush, a German-silver nail-file, and a good, plain, honest rubber comb—on the bureau in Mrs. Lawrence’s room.

With the shyness of a girl on her first night in boarding-school, Una stuck to Mrs. Lawrence’s side in the noisy flow of strange girls down to the dining-room. She was used to being self-absorbed in the noisiest restaurants, but she was trembly about the knees as she crossed the room among curious upward glances; she found it very hard to use a fork without clattering it on the plate when she sat with Mrs. Lawrence and four strangers, at a table for six.

They all were splendidly casual and wise and good-looking. With no men about to intimidate them—or to attract them—they made a solid phalanx of bland, satisfied femininity, and Una felt more barred out than in an office. She longed for a man who would be curious about her, or cross with her, or perform some other easy, customary, simple-hearted masculine trick.

But she was taken into the friendship of the table when Mrs. Lawrence had finished a harangue on the cardinal sin of serving bean soup four times in two weeks.

“Oh, shut up, Lawrence, and introduce the new kid!” said one girl.

“You wait till I get through with my introductory remarks, Cassavant. I’m inspired to-night. I’m going to take a plate of bean soup and fit it over Ma Fike’s head—upside down.”

“Oh, give Ma Fike a rest!”

Una was uneasy. She wasn’t sure whether this repartee was friendly good spirits or a nagging feud. Like all the ungrateful human race, she considered whether she ought to have identified herself with the noisy Esther Lawrence on entering the Home. So might a freshman wonder, or the guest of a club; always the amiable and vulgar Lawrences are most doubted when they are best-intentioned.

Una was relieved when she was welcomed by the four:

Mamie Magen, the lame Jewess, in whose big brown eyes was an eternal prayer for all of harassed humanity.

Jennie Cassavant, in whose eyes was chiefly a prayer that life would keep on being interesting—she, the dark, slender, loquacious, observant child who had requested Mrs. Lawrence to shut up.

Rose Larsen, like a pretty, curly-haired boy, though her shoulders were little and adorable in a white-silk waist.

Mrs. Amesbury, a nun of business, pale and silent; her thin throat shrouded in white net; her voice low and self-conscious; her very blood seeming white—a woman with an almost morbid air of guarded purity, whom you could never associate with the frank crudities of marriage. Her movements were nervous and small; she never smiled; you couldn’t be boisterous with her. Yet, Mrs. Lawrence whispered she was one of the chief operators of the telephone company, and, next to the thoughtful and suffering Mamie Magen, the most capable woman she knew.

“How do you like the Tempest and Protest, Miss Golden?” the lively Cassavant said, airily.

“I don’t—”

“Why! The Temperance and Protection Home.”

“Well, I like Mrs. Fike’s shoes. I should think they’d be fine to throw at cats.”

“Good work, Golden. You’re admitted!”

“Say, Magen,” said Mrs. Lawrence, “Golden agrees with me about offices—no chance for women—”

Mamie Magen sighed, and “Esther,” she said, in a voice which must naturally have been rasping, but which she had apparently learned to control like a violin—“Esther dear, if you could ever understand what offices have done for me! On the East Side—always it was work and work and watch all the pretty girls in our block get T. B. in garment-factories, or marry fellows that weren’t any good and have a baby every year, and get so thin and worn out; and the garment-workers’ strikes and picketing on cold nights. And now I am in an office—all the fellows are dandy and polite—not like the floor superintendent where I worked in a department store; he would call down a cash-girl for making change slow—! I have a chance to do anything a man can do. The boss is just crazy to find women that will take an interest in the work, like it was their own you know, he told you so himself—”

“Sure, I know the line of guff,” said Mrs. Lawrence. “And you take an interest, and get eighteen plunks per for doing statistics that they couldn’t get a real college male in trousers to do for less than thirty-five.”

“Or put it like this, Lawrence,” said Jennie Cassavant. “Magen admits that the world in general is a muddle, and she thinks offices are heaven because by comparison with sweat-shops they are half-way decent.”

The universal discussion was on. Everybody but Una and the nun of business threw everything from facts to bread pills about the table, and they enjoyed themselves in as unfeminized and brutal a manner as men in a café. Una had found some one with whom to talk her own shop—and shop is the only reasonable topic of conversation in the world; witness authors being intellectual about editors and romanticism; lovers absorbed in the technique of holding hands; or mothers interested in babies, recipes, and household ailments.

After dinner they sprawled all over the room of Una and Mrs. Lawrence, and talked about theaters, young men, and Mrs. Fike for four solid hours—all but the pretty, boyish Rose Larsen, who had a young man coming to call at eight. Even the new-comer, Una, was privileged to take part in giving Rose extensive, highly detailed, and not entirely proper advice—advice of a completeness which would doubtless have astonished the suitor, then dressing somewhere in a furnished room and unconscious of the publicity of his call. Una also lent Miss Larsen a pair of silk stockings, helped three other girls to coerce her curly hair, and formed part of the solemn procession that escorted her to the top of the stairs when the still unconscious young man was announced from below. And it was Una who was able to see the young man without herself being seen, and to win notoriety by being able to report that he had smooth black hair, a small mustache, and carried a stick.

Una was living her boarding-school days now, at twenty-six. The presence of so many possible friends gave her self-confidence and self-expression. She went to bed happy that night, home among her own people, among the women who, noisy or reticent, slack or aspiring, were joined to make possible a life of work in a world still heavy-scented with the ideals of the harem.

title: The Job (Lewis)/The Office/Chapter 11


text:
The Job (Lewis)/The Office/Chapter 12

THAT same oasis of a week gave to Una her first taste of business responsibility, of being in charge and generally comporting herself as do males. But in order to rouse her thus, Chance broke the inoffensive limb of unfortunate Mr. Troy Wilkins as he was stepping from his small bronchial motor-car to an icy cement block, on seven o’clock of Friday evening.

When Una arrived at the office on Saturday morning she received a telephone message from Mr. Wilkins, directing her to take charge of the office, of Bessie Kraker, and the office-boy, and the negotiations with the Comfy Coast Building and Development Company regarding the planning of three rows of semi-detached villas.

For three weeks the office was as different from the treadmill that it familiarly had been, as the Home Club and Lawrence’s controversial room were different from the Grays’ flat. She was glad to work late, to arrive not at eight-thirty, but at a quarter to eight, to gallop down to a cafeteria for coffee and a sandwich at noon, to be patient with callers, and to try to develop some knowledge of spelling in that child of nature, Bessie Kraker. She walked about the office quickly, glancing proudly at its neatness. Daily, with an operator’s headgear, borrowed from the telephone company, over her head, she spent half an hour talking with Mr. Wilkins, taking his dictation, receiving his cautions and suggestions, reassuring him that in his absence the Subway ran and Tammany still ruled. After an agitated conference with the vice-president of the Comfy Coast Company, during which she was eloquent as an automobile advertisement regarding Mr. Wilkins’s former masterpieces with their “every modern improvement, parquet floors, beam ceilings, plate-rack, hardwood trim throughout, natty and novel decorations,” Una reached the zenith of salesman’s virtues—she “closed the deal.”

Mr. Wilkins came back and hemmed and hawed a good deal; he praised the work she hadn’t considered well done, and pointed out faults in what she considered particularly clever achievements, and was laudatory but dissatisfying in general. In a few days he, in turn, reached the zenith of virtue on the part of boss—he raised her salary. To fifteen dollars a week. She was again merely his secretary, however, and the office trudged through another normal period when all past drama seemed incredible and all the future drab.

But Una was certain now that she could manage business, could wheedle Bessies and face pompous vice-presidents and satisfy querulous Mr. Wilkinses. She looked forward; she picked at architecture as portrayed in Mr. Wilkins’s big books; she learned the reason and manner of the rows of semi-detached, semi-suburban, semi-comfortable, semi-cheap, and somewhat less than semi-attractive houses.

She was not afraid of the office world now; she had a part in the city and a home.

She thought of Walter Babson. Sometimes, when Mrs. Lawrence was petulant or the office had been unusually exhausting, she fancied that she missed him. But instead of sitting and brooding over folded hands, in woman’s ancient fashion, she took a man’s unfair advantage—she went up to the gymnasium of the Home Club and worked with the chest-weights and flying-rings—a solemn, happy, busy little figure. She laughed more deeply, and she felt the enormous rhythm of the city, not as a menacing roar, but as a hymn of triumph.

She could never be intimate with Mamie Magen as she was with the frankly disillusioned Mrs. Lawrence; she never knew whether Miss Magen really liked her or not; her smile, which transfigured her sallow face, was equally bright for Una, for Mrs. Fike, and for beggars. Yet it was Miss Magen whose faith in the purpose of the struggling world inspired Una. Una walked with her up Madison Avenue, past huge old brownstone mansions, and she was unconscious of suiting her own quick step to Miss Magen’s jerky lameness as the Jewess talked of her ideals of a business world which should have generosity and chivalry and the accuracy of a biological laboratory; in which there would be no need of charity to employee.... Or to employer.

Mamie Magen was the most highly evolved person Una had ever known. Una had, from books and newspapers and Walter Babson, learned that there were such things as socialists and earnest pessimists, and the race sketchily called “Bohemians”—writers and artists and social workers, who drank claret and made love and talked about the free theater, all on behalf of the brotherhood of man. Una pictured the socialists as always attacking capitalists; the pessimists as always being bitter and egotistic; Bohemians as always being dissipated, but as handsome and noisy and gay.

But Mamie Magen was a socialist who believed that the capitalists with their profit-sharing and search for improved methods of production were as sincere in desiring the scientific era as were the most burning socialists; who loved and understood the most oratorical of the young socialists with their hair in their eyes, but also loved and understood the clean little college boys who came into business with a desire to make it not a war, but a crusade. She was a socialist who was determined to control and glorify business; a pessimist who was, in her gentle reticent way, as scornful of half-churches, half-governments, half-educations, as the cynical Mrs. Lawrence. Finally, she who was not handsome or dissipated or gay, but sallow and lame and Spartan, knew “Bohemia” better than most of the professional Hobohemians. As an East Side child she had grown up in the classes and parties of the University Settlement; she had been held upon the then juvenile knees of half the distinguished writers and fighters for reform, who had begun their careers as settlement workers; she, who was still unknown, a clerk and a nobody, and who wasn’t always syntactical, was accustomed to people whose names had been made large and sonorous by newspaper publicity; and at the age when ambitious lady artists and derailed Walter Babsons came to New York and determinedly seized on Bohemia, Mamie Magen had outgrown Bohemia and become a worker.

To Una she explained the city, made it comprehensible, made art and economics and philosophy human and tangible. Una could not always follow her, but from her she caught the knowledge that the world and all its wisdom is but a booby, blundering school-boy that needs management and could be managed, if men and women would be human beings instead of just business men, or plumbers, or army officers, or commuters, or educators, or authors, or clubwomen, or traveling salesmen, or Socialists, or Republicans, or Salvation Army leaders, or wearers of clothes. She preached to Una a personal kinghood, an education in brotherhood and responsible nobility, which took in Una’s job as much as it did government ownership or reading poetry.

Not always was Una breathlessly trying to fly after the lame but broad-winged Mamie Magen. She attended High Mass at the Spanish church on Washington Heights with Mrs. Lawrence; felt the beauty of the ceremony; admired the simple, classic church; adored the padre; and for about one day planned to scorn Panama Methodism and become a Catholic, after which day she forgot about Methodism and Catholicism. She also accompanied Mrs. Lawrence to a ceremony much less impressive and much less easily forgotten—to a meeting with a man.

Mrs. Lawrence never talked about her husband, but in this reticence she was not joined by Rose Dawn or Jennie Cassavant. Jennie maintained that the misfitted Mr. Lawrence was alive, very much so; that Esther and he weren’t even divorced, but merely separated. The only sanction Mrs. Lawrence ever gave to this report was to blurt out one night: “Keep up your belief in the mysticism of love and all that kind of sentimental sex stuff as long as you can. You’ll lose it some day fast enough. Me, I know that a woman needs a man just the same as a man needs a woman—and just as darned unpoetically. Being brought up a Puritan, I never can quite get over the feeling that I oughtn’t to have anything to do with men—me as I am—but believe me it isn’t any romantic ideal. I sure want ’em.”

Mrs. Lawrence continually went to dinners and theaters with men; she told Una all the details, as women do, from the first highly proper handshake down in the pure-minded hall of the Home Club at eight, to the less proper good-night kiss on the dark door-step of the Home Club at midnight. But she was careful to make clear that one kiss was all she ever allowed, though she grew dithyrambic over the charming, lonely men with whom she played—a young doctor whose wife was in a madhouse; a clever, restrained, unhappy old broker.

Once she broke out: “Hang it! I want love, and that’s all there is to it—that’s crudely all there ever is to it with any woman, no matter how much she pretends to be satisfied with mourning the dead or caring for children, or swatting a job or being religious or anything else. I’m a low-brow; I can’t give you the economics of it and the spiritual brotherhood and all that stuff, like Mamie Magen. But I know women want a man and love—all of it.”

Next evening she took Una to dinner at a German restaurant, as chaperon to herself and a quiet, insistent, staring, good-looking man of forty. While Mrs. Lawrence and the man talked about the opera, their eyes seemed to be defying each other. Una felt that she was not wanted. When the man spoke hesitatingly of a cabaret, Una made excuse to go home.

Mrs. Lawrence did not return till two. She moved about the room quietly, but Una awoke.

“I’m glad I went with him,” Mrs. Lawrence said, angrily, as though she were defending herself.

Una asked no questions, but her good little heart was afraid. Though she retained her joy in Mrs. Lawrence’s willingness to take her and her job seriously, Una was dismayed by Mrs. Lawrence’s fiercely uneasy interest in men.... She resented the insinuation that the sharp, unexpected longing to feel Walter’s arms about her might be only a crude physical need for a man, instead of a mystic fidelity to her lost love.

Being a lame marcher, a mind which was admittedly “shocked at each discovery of the aliveness of theory,” Una’s observation of the stalking specter of sex did not lead her to make any very lucid conclusions about the matter. But she did wonder a little if this whole business of marriages and marriage ceremonies and legal bonds which any clerkly pastor can gild with religiosity was so sacred as she had been informed in Panama. She wondered a little if Mrs. Lawrence’s obvious requirement of man’s companionship ought to be turned into a sneaking theft of love. Una Golden was not a philosopher; she was a workaday woman. But into her workaday mind came a low light from the fire which was kindling the world; the dual belief that life is too sacred to be taken in war and filthy industries and dull education; and that most forms and organizations and inherited castes are not sacred at all.

The aspirations of Mamie Magen and the alarming frankness of Mrs. Lawrence were not all her life at the Home Club. With pretty Rose Larsen and half a dozen others she played. They went in fluttering, beribboned parties to the theater; they saw visions at symphony concerts, and slipped into exhibits of contemporary artists at private galleries on Fifth Avenue. When spring came they had walking parties in Central Park, in Van Cortlandt Park, on the Palisades, across Staten Island, and picnicked by themselves or with neat, trim-minded, polite men clerks from the various offices and stores where the girls worked. They had a perpetual joy in annoying Mrs. Fike by parties on fire-escapes, by lobster Newburgh suppers at midnight. They were discursively excited for a week when Rose Larsen was followed from the surface-car to the door by an unknown man; and they were unhappily excited when, without explanations, slim, daring Jennie Cassavant was suddenly asked to leave the Home Club; and they had a rose-lighted dinner when Livy Hedger announced her engagement to a Newark lawyer.

Various were the Home Club women in training and work and ways; they were awkward stenographers and dependable secretaries; fashion artists and department-store clerks; telephone girls and clever college-bred persons who actually read manuscripts and proof, and wrote captions or household-department squibs for women’s magazines—real editors, or at least real assistant editors; persons who knew authors and illustrators, as did the great Magen. They were attendants in dentists’ offices and teachers in night-schools and filing-girls and manicurists and cashiers and blue-linen-gowned super-waitresses in artistic tea-rooms. And cliques, caste, they did have. Yet their comradeship was very sweet, quite real; the factional lines were not drawn according to salary or education or family, but according to gaiety or sobriety or propriety.

Una was finding not only her lost boarding-school days, but her second youth—perhaps her first real youth.

Though the questions inspired by the exceptional Miss Magen and the defiant Mrs. Lawrence kept her restless, her association with the play-girls, her growing acquaintanceship with women who were easy-minded, who had friends and relatives and a place in the city, who did not agonize about their jobs or their loves, who received young men casually and looked forward to marriage and a comfortable flat in Harlem, made Una feel the city as her own proper dwelling. Now she no longer plodded along the streets wonderingly, a detached little stranger; she walked briskly and contentedly, heedless of crowds, returning to her own home in her own city. Most workers of the city remain strangers to it always. But chance had made Una an insider.

It was another chapter in the making of a business woman, that spring of happiness and new stirrings in the Home Club; it was another term in the unplanned, uninstructed, muddling, chance-governed college which civilization unwittingly keeps for the training of men and women who will carry on the work of the world.

It passed swiftly, and July and vacation-time came to Una.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: The Job (Lewis)/The Office/Chapter 12


text:
The Job (Lewis)/The Office/Chapter 13

IT was hard enough to get Mr. Wilkins to set a definite date for her summer vacation; the time was delayed and juggled till Mrs. Lawrence, who was to have gone with Una, had to set off alone. But it was even harder for Una to decide where to go for her vacation.

There was no accumulation of places which she had fervently been planning to see. Indeed, Una wasn’t much interested in any place besides New York and Panama; and of the questions and stale reminiscences of Panama she was weary. She decided to go to a farm in the Berkshires largely because she had overheard a girl in the Subway say that it was a good place.

When she took the train she was brave with a new blue suit, a new suit-case, a two-pound box of candy, copies of the Saturday Evening Post and the Woman’s Home Companion, and Jack London’s People of the Abyss, which Mamie Magen had given her. All the way to Pittsfield, all the way out to the farm by stage, she sat still and looked politely at every large detached elm, every cow or barefoot boy.

She had set her methodical mind in order; had told herself that she would have time to think and observe. Yet if a census had been taken of her thoughts, not sex nor economics, not improving observations of the flora and fauna of western Massachusetts, would have been found, but a half-glad, half-hysterical acknowledgment that she had not known how tired and office-soaked she was till now, when she had relaxed, and a dull, recurrent wonder if two weeks would be enough to get the office poison out of her body. Now that she gave up to it, she was so nearly sick that she couldn’t see the magic of the sheer green hillsides and unexpected ponds, the elm-shrined winding road, towns demure and white. She did not notice the huge, inn-like farm-house, nor her bare room, nor the noisy dining-room. She sat on the porch, exhausted, telling herself that she was enjoying the hill’s slope down to a pond that was yet bright as a silver shield, though its woody shores had blurred into soft darkness, the enchantment of frog choruses, the cooing pigeons in the barn-yard.

“Listen. A cow mooing. Thank the Lord I’m away from New York—clean forgotten it—might be a million miles away!” she assured herself.

Yet all the while she continued to picture the office—Bessie’s desk, Mr. Wilkins’s inkwell, the sinister gray scrub-rag in the wash-room, and she knew that she needed some one to lure her mind from the office.

She was conscious that some man had left the chattering rocking-chair group at the other end of the long porch and had taken the chair beside her.

“Miss Golden!” a thick voice hesitated.

“Yes.”

“Say, I thought it was you. Well, well, the world’s pretty small, after all. Say, I bet you don’t remember me.”

In the porch light Una beheld a heavy-shouldered, typical American business man, in derby hat and clipped mustache, his jowls shining with a recent shave; an alert, solid man of about forty-five. She remembered him as a man she had been glad to meet; she felt guiltily that she ought to know him—perhaps he was a Wilkins client, and she was making future difficulty in the office. But place him she could not.

“Oh yes, yes, of course, though I can’t just remember your name. I always can remember faces, but I never can remember names,” she achieved.

“Sure, I know how it is. I’ve often said, I never forget a face, but I never can remember names. Well, sir, you remember Sanford Hunt that went to the commercial college—”

“Oh, now I know—you’re Mr. Schwirtz of the Lowry Paint Company, who had lunch with us and told me about the paint company—Mr. Julius Schwirtz.”

“You got me.... Though the fellows usually call me ‘Eddie’—Julius Edward Schwirtz is my full name—my father was named Julius, and my mother’s oldest brother was named Edward—my old dad used to say it wasn’t respectful to him because I always preferred ‘Eddie’—old codger used to get quite het up about it. Julius sounds like you was an old Roman or something, and in the business you got to have a good easy name. Say, speaking of that, I ain’t with Lowry any more; I’m chief salesman for the Ætna Automobile Varnish and Wax Company. I certainly got a swell territory—New York, Philly, Bean-Town, Washi’nun, Balt’more, Cleveland, Columbus, Akron, and so on, and of course most especially Detroit. Sell right direct to the jobbers and the big auto companies. Good bunch of live wires. Some class! I’m rolling in my little old four thousand bucks a year now, where before I didn’t hardly make more’n twenty-six or twenty-eight hundred. Keeps me on the jump alrightee. Fact. I got so tired and run-down— I hadn’t planned to take any vacation at all, but the boss himself says to me, ‘Eddie, we can’t afford to let you get sick; you’re the best man we’ve got,’ he says, ’and you got to take a good vacation now and forget all about business for a couple weeks.’ ‘Well,’ I says, ‘I was just wondering if you was smart enough to get along without me if I was to sneak out and rubber at some scenery and maybe get up a flirtation with a pretty summer girl’—and I guess that must be you, Miss Golden!—and he laughs and says, ‘Oh yes, I guess the business wouldn’t go bust for a few days,’ and so I goes down and gets a shave and a hair-cut and a singe and a shampoo—there ain’t as much to cut as there used to be, though—ha, ha!—and here I am.”

“Yes!” said Una affably....

Miss Una Golden, of Panama and the office, did not in the least feel superior to Mr. Eddie Schwirtz’s robust commonness. The men she knew, except for pariahs like Walter Babson, talked thus. She could admire Mamie Magen’s verbal symphonies, but with Mr. Schwirtz she was able to forget her little private stock of worries and settle down to her holiday.

Mr. Schwirtz hitched forward in his rocker, took off his derby, stroked his damp forehead, laid his derby and both his hands on his stomach, rocked luxuriously, and took a fresh hold on the conversation:

“But say! Here I am gassing all about myself, and you’ll want to be hearing about Sandy Hunt. Seen him lately?”

“No, I’ve lost track of him—you do know how it is in such a big city.”

“Sure, I know how it is. I was saying to a fellow just the other day, ’Why, gosh all fish-hooks!’ I was saying, ‘it seems like it’s harder to keep in touch with a fellow here in New York than if he lived in Chicago—time you go from the Bronx to Flatbush or Weehawken, it’s time to turn round again and go home!’ Well, Hunt’s married—you know, to that same girl that was with us at lunch that day—and he’s got a nice little house in Secaucus. He’s still with Lowry. Good job, too, assistant bookkeeper, pulling down his little twenty-seven-fifty regular, and they got a baby, and let me tell you she makes him a mighty fine wife, mighty bright little woman. Well, now, say! How are you getting along, Miss Golden? Everything going bright and cheery?”

“Yes—kind of.”

“Well, that’s good. You’ll do fine, and pick up some good live wire of a husband, too—”

“I’m never going to marry. I’m going—”

“Why, sure you are! Nice, bright woman like you sticking in an office! Office is no place for a woman. Takes a man to stand the racket. Home’s the place for a woman, except maybe some hatchet-faced old battle-ax like the cashier at our shop. Shame to spoil a nice home with her. Why, she tried to hold up my vacation money, because she said I’d overdrawn—”

“Oh, but Mr. Schwirtz, what can a poor girl do, if you high and mighty men don’t want to marry her?”

“Pshaw. There ain’t no trouble like that in your case, I’ll gamble!”

“Oh, but there is. If I were pretty, like Rose Larsen—she’s a girl that stays where I live—oh! I could just eat her up, she’s so pretty, curly hair and big brown eyes and a round face like a boy in one of those medieval pictures—”

“That’s all right about pretty squabs. They’re all right for a bunch of young boys that like a cute nose and a good figger better than they do sense— Well, you notice I remembered you, all right, when you went and forgot poor old Eddie Schwirtz. Yessir, by golly! teetotally plumb forgot me. I guess I won’t get over that slam for a while.”

“Now that isn’t fair, Mr. Schwirtz; you know it isn’t—it’s almost dark here on the porch, even with the lamps. I couldn’t really see you. And, besides, I did recognize you—I just couldn’t think of your name for the moment.”

“Yuh, that listens fine, but poor old Eddie’s heart is clean busted just the same—me thinking of you and your nice complexion and goldie hair and the cute way you talked at our lunch—whenever Hunt shut up and gave you a chance—honest, I haven’t forgot yet the way you took off old man—what was it?—the old stiff that ran the commercial college, what was his name?”

“Mr. Whiteside?” Una was enormously pleased and interested. Far off and dim were Miss Magen and the distressing Mrs. Lawrence; and the office of Mr. Troy Wilkins was fading.

“Yuh, I guess that was it. Do you remember how you gave us an imitation of him telling the class that if they’d work like sixty they might get to be little tin gods on wheels like himself, and how he’d always keep dropping his eye-glasses and fishing’em up on a cord while he was talking—don’t you remember how you took him off? Why, I thought Mrs. Hunt-that-is—I’ve forgotten what her name was before Sandy married her—why, I thought she’d split, laughing. She admired you a whole pile, lemme tell you; I could see that.”

Not unwelcome to the ears of Una was this praise, but she was properly deprecatory: “Why, she probably thought I was just a stuffy, stupid, ugly old thing, as old as—”

“As old as Eddie Schwirtz, heh? Go on, insult me! I can stand it! Lemme tell you I ain’t forty-three till next October. Look here now, little sister, I know when a woman admires another. Lemme tell you, if you’d ever traveled for dry-goods like I did, out of St. Paul once, for a couple of months—nev-er again; paint and varnish is good enough for Eddie any day—and if you’d sold a bunch of women buyers, you’d know how they looked when they liked a thing, alrightee! Not that I want to knock The Sex, y’ understand, but you know yourself, bein’ a shemale, that there’s an awful lot of cats among the ladies—God bless’em—that wouldn’t admit another lady was beautiful, not if she was as good-looking as Lillian Russell, corking figger and the swellest dresser in town.”

“Yes, perhaps—sometimes,” said Una.

She did not find Mr. Schwirtz dull.

“But I was saying: It was a cinch to see that Sandy’s girl thought you was ace high, alrightee. She kept her eyes glommed onto you all the time.”

“But what would she find to admire?”

“Uh-huh, fishing for compliments!”

“No, I am not, so there!” Una’s cheeks burned delightfully. She was back in Panama again—in Panama, where for endless hours on dark porches young men tease young women and tell them that they are beautiful.... Mr. Schwirtz was direct and “jolly,” like Panama people; but he was so much more active and forceful than Henry Carson; so much more hearty than Charlie Martindale; so distinguished by that knowledge of New York streets and cafés and local heroes which, to Una, the recent convert to New York, seemed the one great science.

Their rockers creaked in complete sympathy.

The perfect summer man took up his shepherd’s tale:

“There’s a whole lot of things she’d certainly oughta have admired in you, lemme tell you. I suppose probably Maxine Elliott is better-looking than what you are, maybe, but I always was crazy over your kind of girl—blond hair and nice, clear eyes and just shoulder-high—kind of a girl that could snuggle down beside a fireplace and look like she grew there—not one of these domineerin’ sufferin’ cats females. No, nor one of these overdressed New-York chickens, neither, but cute and bright—”

“Oh, you’re just flattering me, Mr. Schwirtz. Mr. Hunt told me I should watch out for you.”

“No, no; you got me wrong there. ‘I dwell on what-is-it mountain, and my name is Truthful James,’ like the poet says! Believe me, I may be a rough-neck drummer, but I notice these things.”

“Oh!... Oh, do you like poetry?”

Without knowing precisely what she was trying to do, Una was testing Mr. Schwirtz according to the somewhat contradictory standards of culture which she had acquired from Walter Babson, Mamie Magen, Esther Lawrence, Mr. Wilkins’s books on architecture, and stray copies of The Outlook, The Literary Digest, Current Opinion, The Nation, The Independent, The Review of Reviews, The World’s Work, Collier’s, and The Atlantic Monthly, which she had been glancing over in the Home Club library. She hadn’t learned much of the technique of the arts, but she had acquired an uneasy conscience of the sort which rather discredits any book or music or picture which it easily enjoys. She was, for a moment, apologetic to these insistent new standards, because she had given herself up to Mr. Schwirtz’s low conversation.... She was not vastly different from a young lady just back in Panama from a term in the normal school, with new lights derived from a gentlemanly young English teacher with poetic interests and a curly mustache.

“Sure,” affirmed Mr. Schwirtz, “I like poetry fine. Used to read it myself when I was traveling out of St. Paul and got kind of stuck on a waitress at Eau Claire.” This did not perfectly satisfy Una, but she was more satisfied that he had heard the gospel of culture after he had described, with much detail, his enjoyment of a “fella from Boston, perfessional reciter; they say he writes swell poetry himself; gave us a program of Kipling and Ella Wheeler Wilcox before the Elks—real poetic fella.”

“Do you go to concerts, symphonies, and so on, much?” Una next catechized.

“Well, no; that’s where I fall down. Just between you and I, I never did have much time for these high-brows that try to make out they’re so darn much better than common folks by talking about motifs and symphony poems and all that long-haired stuff. Fellow that’s in music goods took me to a Philharmonic concert once, and I couldn’t make head or tail of the stuff—conductor batting a poor musician over the ear with his swagger-stick (and him a union man, oughta kicked to his union about the way the conductor treated him) and him coming back with a yawp on the fiddle and getting two laps ahead of the brass band, and they all blowing their stuffings out trying to catch up. Music they call that! And once I went to grand opera—lot of fat Dutchmen all singing together like they was selling old rags. Aw nix, give me one of the good old songs like ‘The Last Rose of Summer.’... I bet you could sing that so that even a sporting-goods drummer would cry and think about the sweetheart he had when he was a kid.”

“No, I couldn’t—I can’t sing a note,” Una said, delightedly.... She had laughed very much at Mr. Schwirtz’s humor. She slid down in her chair and felt more expansively peaceful than she ever had been in the stress of Walter Babson.

“Straight, now, little sister. Own up. Don’t you get more fun out of hearing Raymond Hitchcock sing than you do out of a bunch of fiddles and flutes fighting out a piece by Vaugner like they was Kilkenny cats? ’Fess up, now; don’t you get more downright amusement?”

“Well, maybe I do, sometimes; but that doesn’t mean that all this cheap musical comedy music is as good as opera, and so on, if we had our—had musical educations—”

“Oh yes; that’s what they all say! But I notice that Hitchcock and George M. Cohan go on drawing big audiences every night—yes, and the swellest, best-dressed, smartest people in New York and Brooklyn, too—it’s in the gallery at the opera that you find all these Wops and Swedes and Lord knows what-all. And when a bunch of people are out at a lake, say, you don’t ever catch’em singing Vaugner or Lits or Gryge or any of them guys. If they don’t sing, ‘In the Good Old Summer-Time,’ it’s ‘Old Black Joe,’ or ‘Nelly Was a Lady,’ or something that’s really got some melody to it.”

The neophyte was lured from her new-won altar. Cold to her knees was the barren stone of the shrine; and she feebly recanted, “Yes, that’s so.”

Mr. Schwirtz cheerfully took out a cigar, smelled it, bit it, luxuriously removed the band, requested permission to smoke, lighted the cigar without waiting for an answer to that request, sighed happily, and dived again:

“Not that I’m knocking the high-brows, y’ understand. This dress-suit music is all right for them that likes it. But what I object to is their trying to stuff it down my throat! I let’em alone, and if I want to be a poor old low-brow and like reg’lar music, I don’t see where they get off to be telling me I got to go to concerts. Honest now, ain’t that the truth?”

“Oh yes, that way—”

“All these here critics telling what low-brows us American business men are! Just between you and I, I bet I knock down more good, big, round, iron men every week than nine-tenths of these high-brow fiddlers—yes, and college professors and authors, too!”

“Yes, but you shouldn’t make money your standard,” said Una, in company with the invisible chorus of Mamie Magen and Walter Babson.

“Well, then, what are you going to make a standard?” asked Mr. Schwirtz, triumphantly.

“Well—” said Una.

“Understan’ me; I’m a high-brow myself some ways. I never could stand these cheap magazines. I’d stop the circulation of every last one of them; pass an act of Congress to make every voter read some A-1, high-class, intellectual stuff. I read Rev. Henry van Dyke and Newell Dwight Hillis and Herbert Kaufman and Billy Sunday, and all these brainy, inspirational fellows, and let me tell you I get a lot of talking-points for selling my trade out of their spiels, too. I don’t believe in all this cheap fiction—these nasty realistic stories (like all the author could see in life was just the bad side of things—I tell you life’s bad enough without emphasizing the rotten side, all these unhappy marriages and poverty and everything—I believe if you can’t write bright, optimistic, cheerful things, better not write at all). And all these sex stories! Don’t believe in’em! Sensational! Don’t believe in cheap literature of no sort.... Oh, of course it’s all right to read a coupla detective stories or a nice, bright, clean love-story just to pass the time away. But me, I like real, classy, high-grade writers, with none of this slangy dialogue or vulgar stuff. ’Specially I like essays on strenuous, modern American life, about not being in a rut, but putting a punch in life. Yes, sir!”

“I’m glad,” said Una. “I do like improving books.”

“You’ve said it, little sister.... Say, gee! you don’t know what a luxury it is for me to talk about books and literature with an educated, cultured girl like you. Now take the rest of these people here at the farm—nice folks, you understand, mighty well-traveled, broad-gauged, intelligent folks, and all that. There’s a Mr. and Mrs. Cannon; he’s some kind of an executive in the Chicago stock-yards—nice, fat, responsible job. And he was saying to me, ’Mr. Schwirtz,’ he says, ‘Mrs. C. and I had never been to New England till this summer, but we’d toured every other part of the country, and we’ve done Europe thoroughly and put in a month doing Florida, and now,’ he says, ‘I think we can say we’ve seen every point of interest that’s worth an American’s time.’ They’re good American people like that, well-traveled and nice folks. But books—Lord! they can’t talk about books no more than a Jersey City bartender. So you can imagine how pleased I was to find you here.... World’s pretty small, all right. Say, I just got here yesterday, so I suppose we’ll be here about the same length o’ time. If you wouldn’t think I was presumptuous, I’d like mighty well to show you some of the country around here. We could get up a picnic party, ten or a dozen of us, and go up on Bald Knob and see the scenery and have a real jolly time. And I’d be glad to take you down to Lesterhampton—there’s a real old-fashioned inn down there, they say, where Paul Revere stayed one time; they say you can get the best kind of fried chicken and corn on cob and real old-fashioned New England blueberry pie. Would you like to?”

“Why, I should be very pleased to,” said Una.

Mr. Schwirtz seemed to know everybody at the farm. He had been there only thirty-six hours, but already he called Mr. Cannon “Sam,” and knew that Miss Vincent’s married sister’s youngest child had recently passed away with a severe and quite unexpected attack of cholera morbus. Mr. Schwirtz introduced Una to the others so fulsomely that she was immediately taken into the inner political ring. He gave her a first lesson in auction pinochle also. They had music and recitations at ten, and Una’s shyness was so warmed away that she found herself reciting, “I’m Only Mammy’s Pickaninny Coon.”

She went candle-lighted up to a four-poster bed. As she lay awake, her job-branded mind could not keep entirely away from the office, the work she would have to do when she returned, the familiar series of indefinite worries and disconnected office pictures. But mostly she let the rustle of the breathing land inspirit her while she thought of Mr. Julius Edward Schwirtz.

She knew that he was ungrammatical, but she denied that he was uncouth. His deep voice had been very kindly; his clipped mustache was trim; his nails, which had been ragged at that commercial-college lunch, were manicured now; he was sure of himself, while Walter Babson doubted and thrashed about. All of which meant that the tired office-woman was touchily defensive of the man who liked her.

She couldn’t remember just where she had learned it, but she knew that Mr. Schwirtz was a widower.

The fact that she did not have to get up and go to the office was Una’s chief impression at awakening, but she was not entirely obtuse to the morning, to the chirp of a robin, the cluck of the hens, the creak of a hay-wagon, and the sweet smell of cattle. When she arose she looked down a slope of fields so far away that they seemed smooth as a lawn. Solitary, majestic trees cast long shadows over a hilly pasture of crisp grass worn to inviting paths by the cropping cattle. Beyond the valley was a range of the Berkshires with every tree distinct.

Una was tired, but the morning’s radiance inspired her. “My America—so beautiful! Why do we turn you into stuffy offices and ugly towns?” she marveled while she was dressing.

But as breakfast was not ready, her sudden wish to do something magnificent for America turned into what she called a “before-coffee grouch,” and she sat on the porch waiting for the bell, and hoping that the conversational Mr. Schwirtz wouldn’t come and converse. It was to his glory that he didn’t. He appeared in masterful white-flannel trousers and a pressed blue coat and a new Panama, which looked well on his fleshy but trim head. He said, “Mornin’,” cheerfully, and went to prowl about the farm.

All through the breakfast Una caught the effulgence of Mr. Schwirtz’s prosperous-looking solidness, and almost persuaded herself that his jowls and the slabs of fat along his neck were powerful muscles.

He asked her to play croquet. Una played a game which had been respected in the smartest croqueting circles of Panama; she defeated him; and while she blushed and insisted that he ought to have won, Mr. Schwirtz chuckled about his defeat and boasted of it to the group on the porch.

“I was afraid,” he told her, “I was going to find this farm kinda tame. Usually expect a few more good fellows and highballs in mine, but thanks to you, little sister, looks like I’ll have a bigger time than a high-line poker Party.”

He seemed deeply to respect her, and Una, who had never had the débutante’s privilege of ordering men about, who had avoided Henry Carson and responded to Walter Babson and obeyed chiefs in offices, was now at last demanding that privilege. She developed feminine whims and desires. She asked Mr. Schwirtz to look for her handkerchief, and bring her magazine, and arrange her chair cushions, and take her for a walk to “the Glade.”

He obeyed breathlessly.

Following an old and rutted woodland road to the Glade, they passed a Berkshire abandoned farm—a solid house of stone and red timbers, softened by the long grasses that made the orchard a pleasant place. They passed berry-bushes—raspberry and blackberry and currant, now turned wild; green-gold bushes that were a net for sunbeams. They saw yellow warblers flicker away, a king-bird swoop, a scarlet tanager glisten in flight.

“Wonder what that red bird is?” He admiringly looked to her to know.

“Why, I think that’s a cardinal.”

“Golly! I wish I knew about nature.”

“So do I! I don’t really know a thing—”

“Huh! I bet you do!”

“—though I ought to, living in a small town so long. I’d planned to buy me a bird-book,” she rambled on, giddy with sunshine, “and a flower-book and bring them along, but I was so busy getting away from the office that I came off without them. Don’t you just love to know about birds and things?”

“Yuh, I cer’nly do; I cer’nly do. Say, this beats New York, eh? I don’t care if I never see another show or a cocktail. Cer’nly do beat New York. Cer’nly does! I was saying to Sam Cannon, ‘Lord,’ I says, ‘I wonder what a fellow ever stays in the city for; never catch me there if I could rake in the coin out in the country, no, sir!’ And he laughed and said he guessed it was the same way with him. No, sir; my idea of perfect happiness is to be hiking along here with you, Miss Golden.”

He gazed down upon her with a mixture of amorousness and awe. The leaves of scrub-oaks along the road crinkled and shone in the sun. She was lulled to slumberous content. She lazily beamed her pleasure back at him, though a tiny hope that he would be circumspect, not be too ardent, stirred in her. He was touching in his desire to express his interest without ruffling her. He began to talk about Miss Vincent’s affair with Mr. Starr, the wealthy old boarder at the farm. In that topic they passed safely through the torrid wilderness of summer shine and tangled blooms.

The thwarted boyish soul that persisted in Mr. Schwirtz’s barbered, unexercised, coffee-soaked, tobacco-filled, whisky-rotted, fattily degenerated city body shone through his red-veined eyes. He was having a fête champêtre. He gathered berries and sang all that he remembered of “Nut Brown Ale,” and chased a cow and pantingly stopped under a tree and smoked a cigar as though he enjoyed it. In his simple pleasure Una was glad. She admired him when he showed his trained, professional side and explained (with rather confusing details) why the Ætna Automobile Varnish Company was a success. But she fluttered up to her feet, became the wilful débutante again, and commanded, “Come on, Mr. Slow! We’ll never reach the Glade.” He promptly struggled up to his feet. There was lordly devotion in the way he threw away his half-smoked cigar. It indicated perfect chivalry.... Even though he did light another in about three minutes.

The Glade was filled with a pale-green light; arching trees shut off the heat of the summer afternoon, and the leaves shone translucent. Ferns were in wild abundance. They sat on a fallen tree, thick upholstered with moss, and listened to the trickle of a brook. Una was utterly happy. In her very weariness there was a voluptuous feeling that the air was dissolving the stains of the office.

He urged a compliment upon her only once more that day; but she gratefully took it to bed with her: “You’re just like this glade—make a fellow feel kinda calm and want to be good,” he said. “I’m going to cut out—all this boozing and stuff— Course you understand I never make a habit of them things, but still a fellow on the road—”

“Yes,” said Una.

All evening they discussed croquet, Lenox, Florida, Miss Vincent and Mr. Starr, the presidential campaign, and the food at the farm-house. Boarders from the next farm-house came a-calling, and the enlarged company discussed the food at both of the farm-houses, the presidential campaign, Florida, and Lenox. The men and women gradually separated; relieved of the strain of general and polite conversation, the men gratefully talked about business conditions and the presidential campaign and food and motoring, and told sly stories about Mike and Pat, or about Ikey and Jakey; while the women listened to Mrs. Cannon’s stories about her youngest son, and compared notes on cooking, village improvement societies, and what Mrs. Taft would do in Washington society if Judge Taft was elected President. Miss Vincent had once shaken hands with Judge Taft, and she occasionally referred to the incident. Mrs. Cannon took Una aside and told her that she thought Mr. Starr and Miss Vincent must have walked down to the village together that afternoon, as she had distinctly seen them coming back up the road.

Yet Una did not feel Panama-ized.

She was a grown-up person, accepted as one, not as Mrs. Golden’s daughter; and her own gossip now passed at par.

And all evening she was certain that Mr. Schwirtz was watching her.

The boarders from the two farm-houses organized a tremendous picnic on Bald Knob, with sandwiches and chicken salad and cake and thermos bottles of coffee and a whole pail of beans and a phonograph with seven records; with recitations and pastoral merriment and kodaks snapping every two or three minutes; with groups sitting about on blankets, and once in a while some one explaining why the scenery was so scenic. Una had been anxious lest Mr. Schwirtz “pay her too marked attentions; make them as conspicuous as Mr. Starr and Miss Vincent”; for in the morning he had hung about, waiting for a game of croquet with her. But Mr. Schwirtz was equally pleasant to her, to Miss Vincent, and to Mrs. Cannon; and he was attractively ardent regarding the scenery. “This cer’nly beats New York, eh? Especially you being here,” he said to her, aside.

They sang ballads about the fire at dusk, and trailed home along dark paths that smelled of pungent leaf-mold. Mr. Schwirtz lumbered beside her, heaped with blankets and pails and baskets till he resembled a camel in a caravan, and encouraged her to tell how stupid and unenterprising Mr. Troy Wilkins was. When they reached the farm-house the young moon and the great evening star were low in a wash of turquoise above misty meadows; frogs sang; Una promised herself a long and unworried sleep; and the night tingled with an indefinable magic. She was absolutely, immaculately happy, for the first time since she had been ordered to take Walter Babson’s dictation.

Mr. Schwirtz was generous; he invited all the boarders to a hay-ride picnic at Hawkins’s Pond, followed by a barn dance. He took Una and the Cannons for a motor ride, and insisted on buying—not giving, but buying—dinner for them, at the Lesterhampton Inn.

When the débutante Una bounced and said she did wish she had some candy, he trudged down to the village and bought for her a two-pound box of exciting chocolates. And when she longed to know how to play tennis, he rented balls and two rackets, tried to remember what he had learned in two or three games of ten years before, and gave her elaborate explanations. Lest the farm-house experts (Mr. Cannon was said by Mrs. Cannon to be one of the very best players at the Winnetka Country Club) see them, Una and Mr. Schwirtz sneaked out before breakfast. Their tennis costumes consisted of new canvas shoes. They galloped through the dew and swatted at balls ferociously—two happy dubs who proudly used all the tennis terms they knew.

Mr. Schwirtz was always there when she wanted him, but he never intruded, he never was urgent. She kept him away for a week; but in their second week Mr. and Mrs. Cannon, Mr. Starr, Miss Vincent, and the pleasant couple from Gloversville all went away, and Una and Mr. Schwirtz became the elder generation, the seniors, of the boarders. They rather looked down upon the new boarders who came in—tenderfeet, people who didn’t know about Bald Knob or the Glade or Hawkins’s Pond, people who weren’t half so witty or comfy as the giants of those golden, olden days when Mr. Cannon had ruled. Una and Mr. Schwirtz deigned to accompany them on picnics, even grew interested in their new conceptions of the presidential campaign and croquet and food, yet held rather aloof, as became the ancien régime; took confidential walks together, and in secret laughed enormously when the green generation gossiped about them as though they were “interested in each other,” as Mr. Starr and Miss Vincent had been in the far-forgotten time. Una blushed a little when she discovered that every one thought they were engaged, but she laughed at the rumor, and she laughed again, a nervous young laugh, as she repeated it to Mr. Schwirtz.

“Isn’t it a shame the way people gossip! Silly billies,” she said. “We never talked that way about Mr. Starr and Miss Vincent—though in their case we would have been justified.”

“Yes, bet they were engaged. Oh, say, did I tell you about the first day I came here, and Starr took me aside, and says he—”

In their hour-long talks Mr. Schwirtz had not told much about himself, though of his business he had talked often. But on an afternoon when they took a book and a lunch and tramped off to a round-topped, grassy hill, he finally confided in her, and her mild interest in him as an amiable companion deepened to sympathy.

The book was The People of the Abyss, by Jack London, which Mamie Magen had given to Una as an introduction to a knowledge of social conditions. Una had planned to absorb it; to learn how the shockingly poor live. Now she read the first four pages to Mr. Schwirtz. After each page he said that he was interested. At the end of the fourth page, when Una stopped for breath, he commented: “Fine writer, that fella London. And they say he’s quite a fella; been a sailor and a miner and all kinds of things; ver’ intimate friend of mine knows him quite well—met him in’Frisco—and he says he’s been a sailor and all kinds of things. But he’s a socialist. Tell you, I ain’t got much time for these socialists. Course I’m kind of a socialist myself lots-a ways, but these here fellas that go around making folks discontented—! Agitators—! Don’t suppose it’s that way with this London—he must be pretty well fixed, and so of course he’s prob’ly growing conservative and sensible. But most of these socialists are just a lazy bunch of bums that try and see how much trouble they can stir up. They think that just because they’re too lazy to find an opening, that they got the right to take the money away from the fellas that hustle around and make good. Trouble with all these socialist guys is that they don’t stop to realize that you can’t change human nature. They want to take away all the rewards for initiative and enterprise, just as Sam Cannon was saying. Do you s’pose I’d work my head off putting a proposition through if there wasn’t anything in it for me? Then,’nother thing, about all this submerged tenth—these ‘People of the Abyss,’ and all the rest: I don’t feel a darn bit sorry for them. They stick in London or New York or wherever they are, and live on charity, and if you offered’em a good job they wouldn’t take it. Why, look here! all through the Middle West the farmers are just looking for men at three dollars a day, and for hired girls, they’d give hired girls three and four dollars a week and a good home. But do all these people go out and get the jobs? Not a bit of it! They’d rather stay home and yelp about socialism and anarchism and Lord knows what-all. ‘Nother thing: I never could figger out what all these socialists and I. W. W.’s, these ‘I Won’t Work’s,’ would do if we did divide up and hand all the industries over to them. I bet they’d be the very first ones to kick for a return to the old conditions! I tell you, it surprises me when a good, bright man like Jack London or this fella, Upton Sinclair—they say he’s a well-educated fella, too—don’t stop and realize these things.”

“But—” said Una.

Then she stopped.

Her entire knowledge of socialism was comprised in the fact that Mamie Magen believed in it, and that Walter Babson alternated between socialism, anarchism, and a desire to own a large house in Westchester and write poetry and be superior to the illiterate mass. So to the economic spokesman for the Great American Business Man her answer was:

“But—”

“Then look here,” said Mr. Schwirtz. “Take yourself. S’pose you like to work eight hours a day? Course you don’t. Neither do I. I always thought I’d like to be a gentleman farmer and take it easy. But the good Lord saw fit to stick us into these jobs, that’s all we know about it; and we do our work and don’t howl about it like all these socialists and radicals and other windjammers that know more than the Constitution and Congress and a convention of Philadelphia lawyers put together. You don’t want to work as hard as you do and then have to divide up every Saturday with some lazy bum of a socialist that’s too lazy to support himself—yes, or to take a bath!—now do you?”

“Well, no,” Una admitted, in face of this triumphant exposure of liberal fallacies.

The book slipped into her lap.

“How wonderful that line of big woolly clouds is, there between the two mountains!” she said. “I’d just like to fly through them.... I am tired. The clouds rest me so.”

“Course you’re tired, little sister. You just forget about all those guys in the abyss. Tell you a person on the job’s got enough to do looking out for himself.”

“Well—” said Una.

Suddenly she lay back, her hands behind her head, her fingers outstretched among the long, cool grasses. A hum of insects surrounded her. The grasses towering above her eyes were a forest. She turned her head to watch a lady-bug industriously ascend one side of a blade of grass, and with equal enterprise immediately descend the other side. With the office always in her mind as material for metaphors, Una compared the lady-bug’s method to Troy Wilkins’s habit of having his correspondence filed and immediately calling for it again. She turned her face to the sky. She was uplifted by the bold contrast of cumulus clouds and the radiant blue sky.

Here she could give herself up to rest; she was so secure now, with the affable Mr. Schwirtz to guard her against outsiders—more secure and satisfied, she reflected, than she could ever have been with Walter Babson.... A hawk soared above her, a perfect thing of sun-brightened grace, the grasses smelled warm and pleasant, and under her beat the happy heart of the summer land.

“I’m a poor old rough-neck,” said Mr. Schwirtz, “but to-day, up here with you, I feel so darn good that I almost think I’m a decent citizen. Honest, little sister, I haven’t felt so bully for a blue moon.”

“Yes, and I—” she said.

He smoked, while she almost drowsed into slumber to the lullaby of the afternoon.

When a blackbird chased a crow above her, and she sat up to watch the aerial privateering, Mr. Schwirtz began to talk.

He spoke of the flight of the Wright brothers in France and Virginia, which were just then—in the summer of 1908—arousing the world to a belief in aviation. He had as positive information regarding aeroplanes as he had regarding socialism. It seemed that a man who was tremendously on the inside of aviation—who was, in fact, going to use whole tons of aeroplane varnish on aeroplane bodies, next month or next season—had given Mr. Schwirtz secret advices that within five years, by 1913, aeroplanes would be crossing the Atlantic daily, and conveying passengers and mail on regular routes between New York and Chicago.... “Though,” said Mr. Schwirtz, in a sophisticated way, “I don’t agree with these crazy enthusiasts that believe aeroplanes will be used in war. Too easy to shoot’em down.” His information was so sound that he had bought a hundred shares of stock in his customer’s company. In on the ground floor. Stock at three dollars a share. Would be worth two hundred a share the minute they started regular passenger-carrying.

“But at that, I only took a hundred shares. I don’t believe in all this stock-gambling. What I want is sound, conservative investments,” said Mr. Schwirtz.

“Yes, I should think you’d be awfully practical,” mused Una. “My! three dollars to two hundred! You’ll make an awful lot out of it.”

“Well, now, I’m not saying anything. I don’t pretend to be a Wisenheimer. May be nine or ten years—nineteen seventeen or nineteen eighteen—before we are doing a regular business. And at that, the shares may never go above par. But still, I guess I’m middlin’ practical—not like these socialists, ha, ha!”

“How did you ever get your commercial training?”

The question encouraged him to tell the story of his life.

Mostly it was a story of dates and towns and jobs—jobs he had held and jobs from which he had resigned, and all the crushing things he had said to the wicked bosses during those victorious resignings.... Clerk in a general store, in a clothing-store, in a hardware-store—all these in Ohio. A quite excusable, almost laudable, failure in his own hardware-store in a tiny Wisconsin town. Half a dozen clerkships. Collector for a harvester company in Nebraska, going from farm to farm by buggy. Traveling salesman for a St. Paul wholesaler, for a Chicago clothing-house. Married. Partner with his brother-in-law in a drug, paint, and stationery store. Traveling for a Boston paint-house. For the Lowry Paint Company of Jersey City. Now with the automobile wax company. A typical American business career, he remarked, though somehow distinctive, different— A guiding star—

Una listened murmuringly, and he was encouraged to try to express the inner life behind his jobs. Hesitatingly he sought to make vivid his small-boy life in the hills of West Virginia: carving initials, mowing lawns, smoking corn silk, being arrested on Hallowe’en, his father’s death, a certain Irving who was his friend, “carrying a paper route” during two years of high school. His determination to “make something of himself.” His arrival in Columbus, Ohio, with just seventy-eight cents—he emphasized it: “just seventy-eight cents, that’s every red cent I had, when I started out to look for a job, and I didn’t know a single guy in town.” His reading of books during the evenings of his first years in Ohio; he didn’t “remember their titles, exactly,” he said, but he was sure that “he read a lot of them. ”... At last he spoke of his wife, of their buggy-riding, of their neat frame house with the lawn and the porch swing. Of their quarrels—he made it clear that his wife had been “finicky,” and had “fool notions,” but he praised her for having “come around and learned that a man is a man, and sometimes he means a lot better than it looks like; prob’ly he loves her a lot better than a lot of these plush-soled, soft-tongued fellows that give’em a lot of guff and lovey-dovey stuff and don’t shell out the cash. She was a good sport—one of the best.”

Of the death of their baby boy.

“He was the brightest little kid—everybody loved him. When I came home tired at night he would grab my finger—see, this first finger—and hold it, and want me to show him the bunny-book.... And then he died.”

Mr. Schwirtz told it simply, looking at clouds spread on the blue sky like a thrown handful of white paint.

Una had hated the word “widower”; it had suggested Henry Carson and the Panama undertaker and funerals and tired men trying to wash children and looking for a new wife to take over that work; all the smell and grease of disordered side-street kitchens. To her, now, Julius Edward Schwirtz was not a flabby-necked widower, but a man who mourned, who felt as despairingly as could Walter Babson the loss of the baby who had crowed over the bunny-book. She, the motherless, almost loved him as she stood with him in the same depth of human grief. And she cried a little, secretly, and thought of her longing for the dead mother, as he gently went on:

“My wife died a year later. I couldn’t get over it; seemed like I could have killed myself when I thought of any mean thing I might have said to her—not meaning anything, but hasty-like, as a man will. Couldn’t seem to get over it. Evenings were just hell; they were so—empty. Even when I was out on the road, there wasn’t anybody to write to, anybody that cared. Just sit in a hotel room and think about her. And I just couldn’t realize that she was gone. Do you know, Miss Golden, for months, whenever I was coming back to Boston from a trip, it was her I was coming back to, seemed like, even though I knew she wasn’t there—yes, and evenings at home when I’d be sitting there reading, I’d think I heard her step, and I’d look up and smile—and she wouldn’t be there; she wouldn’t ever be there again.... She was a lot like you—same cute, bright sort of a little woman, with light hair—yes, even the same eye-glasses. I think maybe that’s why I noticed you particular when I first met you at that lunch and remembered you so well afterward.... Though you’re really a lot brighter and better educated than what she was—I can see it now. I don’t mean no disrespect to her; she was a good sport; they don’t make’em any better or finer or truer; but she hadn’t never had much chance; she wasn’t educated or a live wire, like you are.... You don’t mind my saying that, do you? How you mean to me what she meant—”

“No, I’m glad—” she whispered.

Unlike the nimble Walter Babson, Mr. Schwirtz did not make the revelation of his tragedy an excuse for trying to stir her to passion. But he had taken and he held her hand among the long grasses, and she permitted it.

That was all.

He did not arouse her; still was it Walter’s dark head and the head of Walter’s baby that she wanted to cradle on her breast. But for Mr. Schwirtz she felt a good will that was broad as the summer afternoon.

“I am very glad you told me. I do understand. I lost my mother just a year ago,” she said, softly.

He squeezed her hand and sighed, “Thank you, little sister.” Then he rose and more briskly announced, “Getting late—better be hiking, I guess.”

Not again did he even touch her hand. But on his last night at the farm-house he begged, “May I come to call on you in New York?” and she said, “Yes, please do.”

She stayed for a day after his departure, a long and lonely Sunday. She walked five miles by herself. She thought of the momently more horrible fact that vacation was over, that the office would engulf her again. She declared to herself that two weeks were just long enough holiday to rest her, to free her from the office; not long enough to begin to find positive joy.

Between shudders before the swiftly approaching office she thought of Mr. Schwirtz. (She still called him that to herself. She couldn’t fit “Eddie” to his trim bulkiness, his maturity.)

She decided that he was wrong about socialism; she feebly tried to see wherein, and determined to consult her teacher in ideals, Mamie Magen, regarding the proper answers to him. She was sure that he was rather crude in manners and speech, rather boastful, somewhat loquacious.

“But I do like him!” she cried to the hillsides and the free sky. “He would take care of me. He’s kind; and he would learn. We’ll go to concerts and things like that in New York—dear me, I guess I don’t know any too much about art things myself. I don’t know why, but even if he isn’t interesting, like Mamie Magen, I like him—I think!”

On the train back to New York, early Monday morning, she felt so fresh and fit, with morning vigorous in her and about her, that she relished the thought of attacking the job. Why, she rejoiced, every fiber of her was simply soaked with holiday; she was so much stronger and happier; New York and the business world simply couldn’t be the same old routine, because she herself was different.

But the train became hot and dusty; the Italians began to take off their collars and hand-painted ties.

And hot and dusty, perspiring and dizzily rushing, were the streets of New York when she ventured from the Grand Central station out into them once more.

It was late. She went to the office at once. She tried to push away her feeling that the Berkshires, where she had arisen to a cool green dawn just that morning, were leagues and years away. Tired she was, but sunburnt and easy-breathing. She exploded into the office, set down her suit-case, found herself glad to shake Mr. Wilkins’s hand and to answer his cordial, “Well, well, you’re brown as a berry. Have a good time?”

The office was different, she cried—cried to that other earlier self who had sat in a train and hoped that the office would be different.

She kissed Bessie Kraker, and by an error of enthusiasm nearly kissed the office-boy, and told them about the farm-house, the view from her room, the Glade, Bald Knob, Hawkins’s Pond; about chickens and fresh milk and pigeons aflutter; she showed them the kodak pictures taken by Mrs. Cannon and indicated Mr. Starr and Miss Vincent and laughed about them till—

“Oh, Miss Golden, could you take a little dictation now?” Mr. Wilkins called.

There was also a pile of correspondence unfiled, and the office supplies were low, and Bessie was behind with her copying, and the office-boy had let the place get as dusty as a hay-loft—and the stiff, old, gray floor-rag was grimly at its post in the wash-room.

“The office isn’t changed,” she said; and when she went out at three for belated lunch, she added, “and New York isn’t, either. Oh, Lord! I really am back here. Same old hot streets. Don’t believe there are any Berkshires; just seems now as though I hadn’t been away at all.”

She sat in negligée on the roof of the Home Club and learned that Rose Larsen and Mamie Magen and a dozen others had just gone on vacation.

“Lord! it’s over for me,” she thought. “Fifty more weeks of the job before I can get away again—a whole year. Vacation is farther from me now than ever. And the same old grind.... Let’s see, I’ve got to get in touch with the Adine Company for Mr. Wilkins before I even do any filing in the morning—”

She awoke, after midnight, and worried: “I mustn’t forget to get after the Adine Company, the very first thing in the morning. And Mr. Wilkins has got to get Bessie and me a waste-basket apiece. Oh, Lord! I wish Eddie Schwirtz were going to take me out for a walk to-morrow, the old darling that he is— I’d walk anywhere rather than ask Mr. Wilkins for those blame waste-baskets!”

title: The Job (Lewis)/The Office/Chapter 13


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