re architects who are not enervated by too much good taste.

Mr. Troy Wilkins, architect, with an office in the Septimus Building,
was a commuter. He wore a derby and a clipped mustache, and took
interest in cameras, player-pianos, phonographs, small motor-cars,
speedometers, tires, patent nicotineless pipes, jolly tobacco for
jimmy-pipes, tennis-rackets, correspondence courses, safety-razors,
optimism, Theodore Roosevelt, pocket flashlights, rubber heels, and all
other well-advertised wares. He was a conservative Republican and a
Congregationalist, and on his desk he kept three silver-framed
photographs--one of his wife and two children, one of his dog Rover, and
one of his architectural masterpiece, the mansion of Peter B. Reardon,
the copper king of Montana.

Mr. Troy Wilkins lamented the passing of the solid and expensive stone
residences of the nineties, but he kept "up to date," and he had added
ideals about half-timbered villas, doorway settles, garages, and
sleeping-porches to his repertoire. He didn't, however, as he often
said, "believe in bungalows any more than he believed in these labor
unions."

Sec. 2

Una Golden had been the chief of Mr. Troy Wilkins's two stenographers
for seven months now--midsummer of 1907, when she was twenty-six. She
had climbed to thirteen dollars a week. The few hundred dollars which
she had received from Captain Golden's insurance were gone, and her
mother and she had to make a science of saving--economize on milk, on
bread, on laundry, on tooth-paste. But that didn't really matter,
because Una never went out except for walks and moving-picture shows,
with her mother. She had no need, no want of clothes to impress
suitors.... She had four worn letters from Walter Babson which she
re-read every week or two; she had her mother and, always, her job.

Sec. 3

Una, an errand-boy, and a young East-Side Jewish stenographer named
Bessie Kraker made up the office force of Troy Wilkins. The office was
on the eighth floor of the Septimus Building, which is a lean,
jerry-built, flashingly pretentious cement structure with cracking walls
and dirty, tiled hallways.

The smeary, red-gold paint which hides the imperfect ironwork of its
elevators does not hide the fact that they groan like lost souls, and
tremble and jerk and threaten to fall. The Septimus Building is typical
of at least one half of a large city. It was "run up" by a speculative
builder for a "quick turn-over." It is