that she read it.

But she was afraid to be alone any more. Anyway, she would explore the
city.

Of the many New Yorks, she had found only Morningside Park, Central
Park, Riverside Drive, the shopping district, the restaurants and
theaters which Walter had discovered to her, a few down-town office
streets, and her own arid region of flats. She did not know the
proliferating East Side, the factories, the endless semi-suburban
stretches--nor Fifth Avenue. Her mother and Mrs. Sessions had inculcated
in her the earnest idea that most parts of New York weren't quite nice.
In over two years in the city she had never seen a millionaire nor a
criminal; she knew the picturesqueness neither of wealth nor of pariah
poverty.

She did not look like an adventurer when, at a Saturday noon of October,
she left the office--slight, kindly, rather timid, with her pale hair
and school-teacher eye-glasses, and clear cheeks set off by comely
mourning. But she was seizing New York. She said over and over, "Why, I
can go and live any place I want to, and maybe I'll meet some folks who
are simply fascinating." She wasn't very definite about these
fascinating folks, but they implied girls to play with and--she
hesitated--and decidedly men, men different from Walter, who would touch
her hand in courtly reverence.

She poked through strange streets. She carried an assortment of "Rooms
and Board" clippings from the "want-ad" page of a newspaper, and
obediently followed their hints about finding the perfect place. She
resolutely did not stop at places not advertised in the paper, though
nearly every house, in some quarters, had a sign, "Room to Rent." Una
still had faith in the veracity of whatever appeared in the public
prints, as compared with what she dared see for herself.

The advertisements led her into a dozen parts of the city frequented by
roomers, the lonely, gray, detached people who dwell in other people's
houses.

It was not so splendid a quest as she had hoped; it was too sharp a
revelation of the cannon-food of the city, the people who had never been
trained, and who had lost heart. It was scarcely possible to tell one
street from another; to remember whether she was on Sixteenth Street or
Twenty-sixth. Always the same rows of red-brick or brownstone houses,
all alike, the monotony broken only by infrequent warehouses or
loft-buildings; always the same doubtful mounting of stone steps, the
same searching for a bell, the same