to seek lover or friend or success. She was a
prisoner of affection and conscience.

She rose and paid her check. She did not glance at the picture of the
bunnies in a basket. She passed out heavily, a woman of sterile sorrow.

Sec. 5

Una recovered her holiday by going shopping. An aisle-man in the
dress-goods department, a magnificent creature in a braided
morning-coat, directed her to the counter she asked for, spoke
eloquently of woolen voiles, picked up her bag, and remarked, "Yes, we
do manage to keep it cool here, even on the hottest days." A shop-girl
laughed with her. She stole into one of the elevators, and, though she
really should have gone home to her mother, she went into the music
department, where, among lattices wreathed with newly dusted roses, she
listened to waltzes and two-steps played by a red-haired girl who was
chewing gum and talking to a man while she played. The music roused Una
to plan a wild dissipation. She would pretend that she had a sweetheart,
that with him she was a-roving.

Una was not highly successful in her make-believe. She could not picture
the imaginary man who walked beside her. She refused to permit him to
resemble Walter Babson, and he refused to resemble anybody else. But she
was throbbingly sure he was there as she entered a drug-store and bought
a "Berline bonbon," a confection guaranteed to increase the chronic
nervous indigestion from which stenographers suffer. Her shadow lover
tried to hold her hand. She snatched it away and blushed. She fancied
that a matron at the next tiny table was watching her silly play,
reflected in the enormous mirror behind the marble soda-counter. The
lover vanished. As she left the drug-store Una was pretending that she
was still pretending, but found it difficult to feel so very
exhilarated.

She permitted herself to go to a motion-picture show. She looked over
all the posters in front of the theater, and a train-wreck, a seaside
love-scene, a detective drama, all invited her.

A man in the seat in front of her in the theater nestled toward his
sweetheart and harshly muttered, "Oh you old honey!" In the red light
from the globe marking an exit she saw his huge red hand, with its
thicket of little golden hairs, creep toward the hand of the girl.

Una longed for a love-scene on the motion-picture screen.

The old, slow familiar pain of congestion in the back of her neck came
back. But she forgot the pain when the love-scene did ap