me one to love, to talk with. Why had she
discouraged the beautiful Charlie Martindale, the time he had tried to
kiss her at a dance? Charlie was fatuous, but he was young, and she
wanted, yes, yes! that was it, she wanted youth, she who was herself so
young. And she would grow old here unless some one, one of these godlike
young men, condescended to recognize her. Grow old among these streets
like piles of lumber.

She charged into the small, white, ambling Golden house, with its
peculiar smell of stale lamb gravy, and on the old broken couch--where
her father had snored all through every bright Sunday afternoon--she
sobbed feebly.

She raised her head to consider a noise overhead--the faint, domestic
thunder of a sewing-machine shaking the walls with its rhythm. The
machine stopped. She heard the noise of scissors dropped on the
floor--the most stuffily domestic sound in the world. The airless house
was crushing her. She sprang up--and then she sat down again. There was
no place to which she could flee. Henry Carson and the district school
were menacing her. And meantime she had to find out what her mother was
sewing--whether she had again been wasting money in buying mourning.

"Poor, poor little mother, working away happy up there, and I've got to
go and scold you," Una agonized. "Oh, I want to earn money, I want to
earn real money for you."

She saw a quadrangle of white on the table, behind a book. She pounced
on it. It was a letter from Mrs. Sessions, and Una scratched it open
excitedly.

Mr. and Mrs. Albert Sessions, of Panama, had gone to New York. Mr.
Sessions was in machinery. They liked New York. They lived in a flat and
went to theaters. Mrs. Sessions was a pillowy soul whom Una trusted.

"Why don't you," wrote Mrs. Sessions, "if you don't find the kind of
work you want in Panama, think about coming up to New York and taking
stenography? There are lots of chances here for secretaries, etc."

Una carefully laid down the letter. She went over and straightened her
mother's red wool slippers. She wanted to postpone for an exquisite
throbbing moment the joy of announcing to herself that she had made a
decision.

She _would_ go to New York, become a stenographer, a secretary to a
corporation president, a rich woman, free, responsible.

The fact of making this revolutionary decision so quickly gave her a
feeling of power, of already being a business woman.

She galloped up-stairs to the room where her