at any other period since her girlhood; and in
long hours of thinking and reading and trying to believe in life, the
insignificant good little thing became a calm-browed woman.

Mrs. Lawrence had married the doctor and gone off to Ohio. They motored
much, she wrote, and read aloud, and expected a baby. Una tried to be
happy in them.

Una had completely got out of touch with Mr. and Mrs. Sessions, but
after her marriage she had gone to call on Mamie Magen, now prosperous
and more earnest than ever, in a Greenwich Village flat; on Jennie
Cassavant, sometime of the Home Club, now obscurely on the stage; on
curly-haired Rose Larsen, who had married a young lawyer. But Una had
fancied that they were suspiciously kind to her, and in angry pride she
avoided them. She often wondered what they had heard about Mr. Schwirtz
from the talkative Mrs. Lawrence. She conceived scenes in which she was
haughtily rhapsodic in defending her good, sensible husband before them.
Then she would long for them and admit that doubtless she had merely
imagined their supercilious pity. But she could not go back to them as a
beggar for friendship.

Also, though she never admitted this motive to herself, she was always
afraid that some day, if she kept in touch with them, her husband would
demand: "Why don't you trot out these fussy lady friends of yours?
Ashamed of me, eh?"

So she drifted away from them, and at times when she could not endure
solitariness she depended upon the women of the family hotel, whom she
met in the corridors and cafe and "parlor."

The aristocrats among them, she found, were the wives of traveling
salesmen, good husbands and well loved, most of them, writing to their
wives daily and longing for the time when they could have places in the
suburbs, with room for chickens and children and love. These aristocrats
mingled only with the sound middle-class of the hotel women, whose
husbands were clerks and bookkeepers resident in the city, or traveling
machinery experts who went about installing small power-plants. They
gossiped with Una about the husbands of the _declasse_ women--men
suspected to be itinerant quack doctors, sellers of dubious mining or
motor stock, or even crooks and gamblers.

There was a group of three or four cheery, buxom, much-bediamonded,
much-massaged women, whose occasionally appearing husbands were sleek
and overdressed. To Una these women were cordial. They invited her to
go shopping, to matinees.