But they stopped so often for cocktails, they
told so many intimate stories of their relations with their husbands,
that Una was timid before them, and edged away from their invitations
except when she was desperately lonely. Doubtless she learned more about
the mastery of people from them, however, than from the sighing,
country-bred hotel women of whom she was more fond; for the cheerful
hussies had learned to make the most of their shoddy lives.

Only one woman in the hotel did Una accept as an actual friend--Mrs.
Wade, a solid, slangy, contented woman with a child to whom she was
devoted. She had, she told Una, "been stuck with a lemon of a husband.
He was making five thousand a year when I married him, and then he went
to pieces. Good-looking, but regular poor white trash. So I cleaned
house--kicked him out. He's in Boston now. Touches me for a ten-spot now
and then. I support myself and the kid by working for a department
store. I'm a wiz at bossing dressmakers--make a Lucile gown out of the
rind of an Edam cheese. Take nothing off nobody--especially you don't
see me taking any more husbands off nobody."

Mostly, Una was able to make out an existence by herself.

She read everything--from the lacy sentimentalism of Myrtle Read to
Samuel Butler and translations of Gorky and Flaubert. She nibbled at
histories of art, and was confirmed in her economic theology by shallow
but earnest manuals of popular radicalism. She got books from a branch
public library, or picked them up at second-hand stalls. At first she
was determined to be "serious" in her reading, but more and more she
took light fiction as a drug to numb her nerves--and forgot the tales as
soon as she had read them.

In ten years of such hypnotic reading Mrs. Una Golden Schwirtz would not
be very different from that Mrs. Captain Golden who, alone in a flat,
had read all day, and forgotten what she had read, and let life dream
into death.

But now Una was still fighting to keep in life.

She began to work out her first definite philosophy of existence. In
essence it was not so very different from the blatant optimism of Mr. S.
Herbert Ross--except that it was sincere.

"Life is hard and astonishingly complicated," she concluded. "No one
great reform will make it easy. Most of us who work--or want to
work--will always have trouble or discontent. So we must learn to be
calm, and train all our faculties, and make others happy."

No more original than t