n.

The rheumatic old canary hobbled along the floor of his cage and tried
to sing. At that Una wept, "She never will hear poor Dickie sing again."

Instantly she remembered--as clearly as though she were actually
listening to the voice and words--that her mother had burst out, "Drat
that bird, it does seem as if every time I try to take a nap he just
tries to wake me up." Una laughed grimly. Hastily she reproved herself,
"Oh, but mother didn't mean--"

But in memory of that healthily vexed voice, it seemed less wicked to
take notice of food, and after a reasonable dinner she put on her kimono
and bedroom slippers, carefully arranged the pillows on the couch, and
lay among them, meditating on her future.

For half an hour she was afire with an eager thought: "Why can't I
really make a success of business, now that I can entirely devote myself
to it? There's women--in real estate, and lawyers and magazine
editors--some of them make ten thousand a year."

So Una Golden ceased to live a small-town life in New York; so she
became a genuine part of the world of offices; took thought and tried to
conquer this new way of city-dwelling.

"Maybe I can find out if there's anything in life--now--besides working
for T. W. till I'm scrapped like an old machine," she pondered. "How I
hate letters about two-family houses in Flatbush!"

She dug her knuckles into her forehead in the effort to visualize the
problem of the hopeless women in industry.

She was an Average Young Woman on a Job; she thought in terms of money
and offices; yet she was one with all the men and women, young and old,
who were creating a new age. She was nothing in herself, yet as the
molecule of water belongs to the ocean, so Una Golden humbly belonged to
the leaven who, however confusedly, were beginning to demand, "Why,
since we have machinery, science, courage, need we go on tolerating war
and poverty and caste and uncouthness, and all that sheer clumsiness?"

Part II

THE OFFICE

CHAPTER IX

The effect of grief is commonly reputed to be noble. But mostly it is a
sterile nobility. Witness the widows who drape their musty weeds over
all the living; witness the mother of a son killed in war who urges her
son's comrades to bring mourning to the mothers of all the sons on the
other side.

Grief is a paralyzing poison. It broke down Una's resistance to the
cares of the office. Hers was no wholesome labor in which she could find
sacred forget