nery.

On the Elevated, beside her all evening, hovering over her bed at night,
was Worry.

"Oh, I ought to have got all that Norris correspondence copied to-day. I
_must_ get at it first thing in the morning.... I wonder if Mr. Wilkins
was sore because I stayed out so long for lunch?... What would I do if I
were fired?"

So would she worry as she left the office. In the evening she wouldn't
so much criticize herself as suddenly and without reason remember
office settings and incidents--startle at a picture of the T-square at
which she had stared while Mr. Wilkins was telephoning.... She wasn't
weary because she worried; she worried because she was weary from the
airless, unnatural, straining life. She worried about everything
available, from her soul to her finger-nails; but the office offered the
largest number of good opportunities.

"After all," say the syndicated philosophers, "the office takes only
eight or nine hours a day. The other fifteen or sixteen, you are free to
do as you wish--loaf, study, become an athlete." This illuminative
suggestion is usually reinforced by allusions to Lincoln and Edison.

Only--you aren't a Lincoln or an Edison, for the most part, and you
don't do any of those improving things. You have the office with you, in
you, every hour of the twenty-four, unless you sleep dreamlessly and
forget--which you don't. Probably, like Una, you do not take any
exercise to drive work-thoughts away.

She often planned to take exercise regularly; read of it in women's
magazines. But she could never get herself to keep up the earnest
clowning of bedroom calisthenics; gymnasiums were either reekingly
crowded or too expensive--and even to think of undressing and dressing
for a gymnasium demanded more initiative than was left in her fagged
organism. There was walking--but city streets become tiresomely
familiar. Of sports she was consistently ignorant.

So all the week she was in the smell and sound of the battle, until
Saturday evening with its blessed rest--the clean, relaxed time which
every woman on the job knows.

Saturday evening! No work to-morrow! A prospect of thirty-six hours of
freedom. A leisurely dinner, a languorous slowness in undressing, a hot
bath, a clean nightgown, and fresh, smooth bed-linen. Una went to bed
early to enjoy the contemplation of these luxuries. She even put on a
lace bed-cap adorned with pink silk roses. The pleasure of relaxing in
bed, of looking lazily at the p