, like lovers. They had picked up two
summer men, and Mrs. Lawrence had so often gone off on picnics with her
man that Una had become uneasy, felt soiled, and come back to the city
early. For this Mrs. Lawrence had never forgiven her. She had recently
become engaged to a doctor who was going to Akron, Ohio, and she
exasperated Una by giving her bland advice about trying to get married.
Una never knew whether she was divorced, or whether the mysterious Mr.
Lawrence had died.

But even the difficile Lawrence was preferable to the strain at the
office. Una was tired clean through and through. She felt as though her
very soul had been drained out by a million blood-sucker
details--constant adjustments to Ross's demands for admiration of his
filthiest office political deals, and the need of keeping friendly with
both sides when Ross was engaged in one of his frequent altercations
with an assistant.

Often she could not eat in the evening. She would sit on the edge of the
bed and cry hopelessly, with a long, feeble, peculiarly feminine
sobbing, till Mrs. Lawrence slammed the door and went off to the motion
pictures. Una kept repeating a little litany she had made regarding the
things she wished people would stop doing--praying to be delivered from
Ross's buoyant egotism, from Mrs. Lawrence's wearing of Una's best
veils, from Mr. Schwirtz's acting as though he wanted to kiss her
whenever he had a whisky breath, from the office-manager who came in to
chat with her just when she was busiest, from the office-boy who always
snapped his fingers as he went down the corridor outside her door, and
from the elevator-boy who sucked his teeth.

She was sorry. She wanted to climb. She didn't want to be a quitter. But
she was at an _impasse_.

On a January day the Pemberton office beheld that most terrifying crisis
that can come to a hard, slave-driving office. As the office put it,
"The Old Man was on a rampage."

Mr. Pemberton, senior, most hoarily awful of all the big chiefs, had
indigestion or a poor balance-sheet. He decided that everything was
going wrong. He raged from room to room. He denounced the new poster,
the new top for the talcum-powder container, the arrangement of the
files, and the whispering in the amen corner of veteran stenographers.
He sent out flocks of "office memoes." Everybody trembled. Mr.
Pemberton's sons actually did some work; and, as the fire spread and the
minor bosses in turn raged among their subordi