ore I'm not.... It's so strange--I like to
have him touch me, and I simply never could stand other men touching
me!... I wonder if he's excited now, too? I wonder what he's doing....
Oh, I'm glad, glad I loved his hands!"

CHAPTER VI

"I never thought a nice girl could be in love with a man who is bad, and
I s'pose Walter is bad. Kind of. But maybe he'll become good."

So Una simple-heartedly reflected on her way to the Subway next morning.
She could not picture what he would do, now that it was hard, dry day
again, and all the world panted through dusty streets. And she
recklessly didn't care. For Walter was not hard and dry and dusty; and
she was going to see him again! Sometimes she was timorous about seeing
him, because he had read the longing in her face, had known her soul
with its garments thrown away. But, timorous or not, she had to see him;
she would never let him go, now that he had made her care for him.

Walter was not in sight when she entered the offices, and she was
instantly swept into the routine. Not clasping hands beguiled her, but
lists to copy, typing errors to erase, and the irritating adjustment of
a shift-key which fiendishly kept falling. For two hours she did not see
him.

About ten-thirty she was aware that he was prosaically strolling toward
her.

Hundreds of times, in secret maiden speculations about love, the girl
Una had surmised that it would be embarrassing to meet a man the morning
after you had yielded to his caress. It had been perplexing--one of
those mysteries of love over which virgins brood between chapters of
novels, of which they diffidently whisper to other girls when young
married friends are amazingly going to have a baby. But she found it
natural to smile up at Walter.... In this varnished, daytime office
neither of them admitted their madness of meeting hands.

He merely stooped over her desk and said, sketchily, "Mornin', little
Goldie."

Then for hours he seemed to avoid her. She was afraid. Most of all,
afraid of her own desire to go to him and wail that he was avoiding her.

At three o'clock, when the office tribe accept with naive gratitude any
excuse to talk, to stop and tell one another a new joke, to rush to the
window and critically view a parade, Una saw that Walter was beginning
to hover near her. She was angry that he did not come straight to her.
He did not seem quite to know whether he wanted her or not. But her face
was calm above her typi