crawled to the top of the heap. And this last she was determined to do.
Though she did hope to get to the top without unduly kicking the
shrieking mass of slaves beneath her, as the bright young men learned to
do.

Whenever she faced Mr. Ross's imperturbable belief that
things-as-they-are were going pretty well, that "you can't change human
nature," Una would become meek and puzzled, lose her small store of
revolutionary economics, and wonder, grope, doubt her millennial faith.
Then she would again see the dead eyes of young girls as they entered
the elevators at five-thirty, and she would rage at all chiefs and
bright young men.... A gold-eye-glassed, kitten-stepping, good little
thing she was, and competent to assist Mr. Ross in his mighty labors,
yet at heart she was a shawled Irish peasant, or a muzhik lost in the
vastness of the steppes; a creature elemental and despairing, facing
mysterious powers of nature--human nature.

CHAPTER XV

Mr. Julius Edward Schwirtz was a regular visitant at the flat of Mrs.
Lawrence and Una. Mrs. Lawrence liked him; in his presence she abandoned
her pretense of being interested in Mamie Magen's arid intellectualism,
and Una's quivering anxieties. Mr. Schwirtz was ready for any party,
whenever he was "in off the road."

Una began to depend on him for amusements. Mrs. Lawrence encouraged her
to appear at her best before him. When he or one of Mrs. Lawrence's men
was coming the two women had an early and quick dinner of cold ham and
canned soup, and hastily got out the electric iron to press a frock;
produced Pemberton's Flesh-Tinted Vanisho Powder, and the lip-stick
whose use Una hated, but which she needed more and more as she came back
from the office bloodless and cold. They studied together the feminine
art of using a new veil, a flower, or fresh white-kid gloves, to change
one's appearance.

Poor Una! She was thinking now, secretly and shamefacedly, of the
"beautifying methods" which she saw advertised in every newspaper and
cheap magazine. She rubbed her red, desk-calloused elbows with
Pemberton's cold-cream. She cold-creamed and massaged her face every
night, standing wearily before a milky mirror in the rather close and
lingerie-scattered bedroom, solemnly rotating her fingers about her
cheeks and forehead, stopping to conjecture that the pores in her nose
were getting enlarged. She rubbed her hair with Pemberton's "Olivine and
Petrol" to keep it from growing thin,