' but really, you know, these women going
to offices, vulgarizing all their fine womanliness, and this shrieking
sisterhood going in for suffrage and Lord knows what. Give me the
reticences of the harem rather than one of these office-women with
gum-chewing vacuities. None of them clever enough to be tragic!" He was
ever so whimsical about the way in which the suffrage movement had
cheated him of the chance to find a "_grande amoureuse_." He sat
opposite Una in the train and solemnly read his golden book. He did not
see Una watch with shy desire every movement of a baby that was talking
to its mother in some unknown dialect of baby-land. He was feeling deep
sensations about Clytemnestra's misfortunes--though he controlled his
features in the most gentlemanly manner, and rose composedly at his
station, letting a well-bred glance of pity fall upon the gum-chewers.

Una found a marvelously clean, new restaurant on Sixth Avenue, with lace
curtains at the window and, between the curtains, a red geranium in a
pot covered with red-crepe paper tied with green ribbon. A new place!
She was tired of the office, the Elevated, the flat on 148th Street, the
restaurants where she tediously had her week-day lunches. She entered
the new restaurant briskly, swinging her black bag. The place had
Personality--the white enameled tables were set diagonally and clothed
with strips of Japanese toweling. Una smiled at a lively photograph of
two bunnies in a basket. With a sensation of freedom and novelty she
ordered coffee, chicken patty, and cocoanut layer-cake.

But the patty and the cake were very much like the hundreds of other
patties and cakes which she had consumed during the past two years, and
the people about her were of the horde of lonely workers who make up
half of New York. The holiday enchantment dissolved. She might as well
be going back to the office grind after lunch! She brooded, while
outside, in that seething summer street, the pageant of life passed by
and no voice summoned her. Men and girls and motors, people who laughed
and waged commerce for the reward of love--they passed her by, life
passed her by, a spectator untouched by joy or noble tragedy, a woman
desperately hungry for life.

She began--but not bitterly, she was a good little thing, you know--to
make the old familiar summary. She had no lover, no friend, no future.
Walter--he might be dead, or married. Her mother and the office, between
them, left her no time