tove, and filled with
cockroaches and the smell of carbolic acid. But the _maison_ Schwirtz
was almost clean. It had an impassioned green carpet, a bedspring which
scarcely sagged at all, a gas-range, and at least a dozen vases with
rococo handles and blobs of gilt.

"Gee! this ain't so bad," declared Mr. Schwirtz. "We can cook all our
eats here, and live on next to nothing per, till the big job busts
loose."

With which he prepared to settle down to a life of leisure. He went out
and bought a pint of whisky, a pound of steak, a pound of cheese, a loaf
of bread, six cigars, and for her a bar of fudge.

So far as Una could calculate, he had less than forty dollars. She burst
out on him. She seemed to be speaking with the brusque voice of an
accomplishing man. In that voice was all she had ever heard from
executives; all the subconsciously remembered man-driving force of the
office world. She ordered him to go and take the job in the
paint-shop--at eighteen dollars a week, or eight dollars a week. She
briefly, but thoroughly, depicted him as alcohol-soaked, poor white
trash. She drove him out, and when he was gone she started to make their
rooms presentable, with an energy she had not shown for months. She
began to dust, to plan curtains for the room, to plan to hide the
bric-a-brac, to plan to rent a typewriter and get commercial copying to
do.

If any one moment of life is more important than the others, this may
have been her crisis, when her husband had become a begging pauper and
she took charge; began not only to think earnest, commonplace, little
Una thoughts about "mastering life," but actually to master it.

CHAPTER XVIII

So long as Mr. Schwirtz contrived to keep his position in the retail
paint-store, Una was busy at home, copying documents and specifications
and form-letters for a stenographic agency and trying to make a science
of quick and careful housework.

She suspected that, now he had a little money again, Mr. Schwirtz was
being riotous with other women--as riotous as one can be in New York on
eighteen dollars a week, with debts and a wife to interfere with his
manly pleasures. But she did not care; she was getting ready to break
the cocoon, and its grubbiness didn't much matter.

Sex meant nothing between them now. She did not believe that she would
ever be in love again, in any phase, noble or crude. While she aspired
and worked she lived like a nun in a cell. And now that she had
s