I can't--there's so much
death." Longing to hear the quavering affection of its song once
more, but keeping herself from even going to the window, to look
for it, with bitter haste she completed her work of getting rid
of things--things--things--the things which were stones of an
imprisoning past.

Sec. 4

Shyness was over Una when at last she was in the house of strangers.
She sat marveling that this square, white cubby-hole of a room was
hers permanently, that she hadn't just come here for an hour or two.
She couldn't get it to resemble her first impression of it. Now the
hallway was actually a part of her life--every morning she would
face the picture of a magazine-cover girl when she came out of
her room.

Her agitation was increased by the problem of keeping up the maiden
modesty appropriate to a Golden, a young female friend of the
Sessionses', in a small flat with gentlemen lodgers and just one
bathroom. Una was saved by not having a spinster friend with whom to
share her shrinking modesty. She simply had to take waiting for her turn
at the bathroom as a matter of course, and insensibly she was impressed
by the decency with which these dull, ordinary people solved the
complexities of their enforced intimacy. When she wildly clutched her
virgin bathrobe about her and passed a man in the hall, he stalked
calmly by without any of the teetering apologies which broad-beamed Mr.
Sessions had learned from his genteel spouse.

She could not at first distinguish among her companions. Gradually they
came to be distinct, important. They held numberless surprises for her.
She would not have supposed that a bookkeeper in a fish-market would be
likely to possess charm. Particularly if he combined that amorphous
occupation with being a boarding-house proprietor. Yet her landlord,
Herbert Gray, with his look of a track-athlete, his confessions of
ignorance and his naive enthusiasms about whatever in the motion
pictures seemed to him heroic, large, colorful, was as admirable as the
several youngsters of her town who had plodded through Princeton or
Pennsylvania and come back to practise law or medicine or gentlemanly
inheritance of business. And his wife, round and comely, laughing
easily, wearing her clothes with an untutored grace which made her cheap
waists smart, was so thoroughly her husband's comrade in everything,
that these struggling nobodies had all the riches of the earth.

The Grays took Una in as though she