Behind all these discoveries regarding the state of being an executive,
behind her day's work and the evenings at her flat when Mamie Magen and
Mr. Fein came to dinner, there were two tremendous secrets:

For her personal life, her life outside the office, she had found a way
out such as might, perhaps, solve the question of loneliness for the
thousands of other empty-hearted, fruitlessly aging office-women. Not
love of a man. She would rather die than have Schwirtz's clumsy feet
trampling her reserve again. And the pleasant men who came to her flat
were--just pleasant. No, she told herself, she did not need a man or
man's love. But a child's love and presence she did need.

She was going to adopt a child. That was her way out.

She was thirty-four now, but by six of an afternoon she felt forty.
Youth she would find--youth of a child's laughter, and the healing of
its downy sleep.

She took counsel with Mamie Magen (who immediately decided to adopt a
child also, and praised Una as a discoverer) and with the good
housekeeping women she knew at Crosshampton Harbor. She was going to be
very careful. She would inspect a dozen different orphan-asylums.

Meanwhile her second secret was making life pregnant with interest:

She was going to change her job again--for the last time she hoped. She
was going to be a creator, a real manager, unhampered by Mr. Truax's
unwillingness to accept women as independent workers and by the growing
animosity of Mrs. Truax.

Sec. 3

Una's interest in the Year-Round Inn at Crosshampton Harbor, the results
obtained by reasonably good meals and a little chintz, and her memory of
the family hotel, had led her attention to the commercial possibilities
of innkeeping.

She was convinced that, despite the ingenuity and care displayed by the
managers of the great urban hotels and the clever resorts, no calling
included more unimaginative slackers than did innkeeping. She had heard
traveling-men at Pemberton's and at Truax & Fein's complain of sour
coffee and lumpy beds in the hotels of the smaller towns; of knives and
forks that had to be wiped on the napkins before using; of shirt-sleeved
proprietors who loafed within reach of the cuspidors while their wives
tried to get the work done.

She began to read the _Hotel News_ and the _Hotel Bulletin_, and she
called on the manager of a supply-house for hotels.

She read in the _Bulletin_ of Bob Sidney, an ex-traveling-man, who, in
partnershi