LITMIR.BIZ

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wait on herself. She summed up the whole town and its possibilities; and she wondered what opportunities the world out beyond Panama had for her. She recalled two trips to Philadelphia and one to Harrisburg. She made out a list of openings with such methodical exactness as she devoted to keeping the dwindling lodge insurance from disappearing altogether. Hers was no poetic outreach like that of the young genius who wants to be off for Bohemia. It was a question of earning money in the least tedious way. Una was facing the feminist problem, without knowing what the word “feminist” meant.

      This was her list of fair fields of fruitful labor:

      She could — and probably would — teach in some hen-coop of pedagogy.

      She could marry, but no one seemed to want her, except old Henry Carson, the widower, with catarrh and three children, who called on her and her mother once in two weeks, and would propose whenever she encouraged him to. This she knew scientifically. She had only to sit beside him on the sofa, let her hand drop down beside his. But she positively and ungratefully didn’t want to marry Henry and listen to his hawking and his grumbling for the rest of her life. Sooner or later one of The Boys might propose. But in a small town it was all a gamble. There weren’t so very many desirable young men — most of the energetic ones went off to Philadelphia and New York. True that Jennie McTevish had been married at thirty-one, when everybody had thought she was hopelessly an old maid. Yet here was Birdie Mayberry unmarried at thirty-four, no one could ever understand why, for she had been the prettiest and jolliest girl in town. Una crossed blessed matrimony off the list as a commercial prospect.

      She could go off and study music, law, medicine, elocution, or any of that amazing hodge-podge of pursuits which are permitted to small-town women. But she really couldn’t afford to do any of these; and, besides, she had no talent for music of a higher grade than Sousa and Victor Herbert; she was afraid of lawyers; blood made her sick; and her voice was too quiet for the noble art of elocution as practised by several satin-waisted, semi-artistic ladies who “gave readings” of Enoch Arden and Evangeline before the Panama Study Circle and the Panama Annual Chautauqua.

      She could have a job selling dry-goods behind the counter in the Hub Store, but that meant loss of caste.

      She could teach dancing — but she couldn’t dance particularly well. And that was all that she could do.

      She had tried to find work as office-woman for Dr. Mayberry, the dentist; in the office of the Panama Wood-Turning Company; in the post-office; as lofty enthroned cashier for the Hub Store; painting place-cards and making “fancy-work” for the Art Needlework Exchange.

      The job behind the counter in the Hub Store was the only one offered her.

      “If I were only a boy,” sighed Una, “I could go to work in the hardware-store or on the railroad or anywhere, and not lose respectability. Oh, I hate being a woman.”

      3

      Una had been trying to persuade her father’s old-time rival, Squire Updegraff, the real-estate and insurance man, that her experience with Captain Golden would make her a perfect treasure in the office. Squire Updegraff had leaped up at her entrance, and blared, “Well, well, and how is the little girl making it?” He had set out a chair for her and held her hand. But he knew that her only experience with her father’s affairs had been an effort to balance Captain Golden’s account-books, which were works of genius in so far as they were composed according to the inspirational method. So there was nothing very serious in their elaborate discussion of giving Una a job.

      It was her last hope in Panama. She went disconsolately down the short street, between the two-story buildings and the rows of hitched lumber-wagons. Nellie Page, the town belle, tripping by in canvas sneakers and a large red hair-ribbon, shouted at her, and Charlie Martindale, of the First National Bank, nodded to her, but these exquisites were too young for her; they danced too well and laughed too easily. The person who stopped her for a long curbstone conference about the weather, while most of the town observed and gossiped, was the fateful Henry Carson. The village sun was unusually blank and hard on Henry’s bald spot to-day. Heavens! she cried to herself, in almost hysterical protest, would she have to marry Henry?

      Miss Mattie Pugh drove by, returning from district school. Miss Mattie had taught at Clark’s Crossing for seventeen years, had grown meek and meager and hopeless. Heavens! thought Una, would she have to be shut into the fetid barn of a small school unless she married Henry?

      “I won’t be genteel! I’ll work in The Hub or any place first!” Una declared. While she trudged home — a pleasant, inconspicuous, fluffy-haired young woman, undramatic as a field daisy — a cataract of protest poured through her. All the rest of her life she would have to meet that doddering old Mr. Mosely, who was unavoidably bearing down on her now, and be held by him in long, meaningless talks. And there was nothing amusing to do! She was so frightfully bored. She suddenly hated the town, hated every evening she would have to spend there, reading newspapers and playing cards with her mother, and dreading a call from Mr. Henry Carson.

      She wanted — wanted some one to love, to talk with. Why had she discouraged the beautiful Charlie Martindale, the time he had tried to kiss her at a dance? Charlie was fatuous, but he was young, and she wanted, yes, yes! that was it, she wanted youth, she who was herself so young. And she would grow old here unless some one, one of these godlike young men, condescended to recognize her. Grow old among these streets like piles of lumber.

      She charged into the small, white, ambling Golden house, with its peculiar smell of stale lamb gravy, and on the old broken couch — where her father had snored all through every bright Sunday afternoon — she sobbed feebly.

      She raised her head to consider a noise overhead — the faint, domestic thunder of a sewing-machine shaking the walls with its rhythm. The machine stopped. She heard the noise of scissors dropped on the floor — the most stuffily domestic sound in the world. The airless house was crushing her. She sprang up — and then she sat down again. There was no place to which she could flee. Henry Carson and the district school were menacing her. And meantime she had to find out what her mother was sewing — whether she had again been wasting money in buying mourning.

      “Poor, poor little mother, working away happy up there, and I’ve got to go and scold you,” Una agonized. “Oh, I want to earn money, I want to earn real money for you.”

      She saw a quadrangle of white on the table, behind a book. She pounced on it. It was a letter from Mrs. Sessions, and Una scratched it open excitedly.

      Mr. and Mrs. Albert Sessions, of Panama, had gone to New York. Mr. Sessions was in machinery. They liked New York. They lived in a flat and went to theaters. Mrs. Sessions was a pillowy soul whom Una trusted.

      “Why don’t you,” wrote Mrs. Sessions, “if you don’t find the kind of work you want in Panama, think about coming up to New York and taking stenography? There are lots of chances here for secretaries, etc.”

      Una carefully laid down the letter. She went over and straightened her mother’s red wool slippers. She wanted to postpone for an exquisite throbbing moment the joy of announcing to herself that she had made a decision.

      She would go to New York, become a stenographer, a secretary to a corporation president, a rich woman, free, responsible.

      The fact of making this revolutionary decision so quickly gave her a feeling of power, of already being a business woman.

      She galloped up-stairs to the room where her mother was driving the sewing-machine.

      “Mumsie!” she cried, “we’re going to New York! I’m going to learn to be a business woman, and the little mother will be all dressed in satin and silks, and dine on what-is-it and peaches and cream — the poem don’t come out right, but, oh, my little mother, we’re going out adventuring, we are!”

      She plunged down beside her mother, burrowed her head in her mother’s lap, kissed that hand whose skin was like thinnest wrinkly tissue-paper.

      “Why, my little daughter, what is it? Has some one sent for us? Is it the letter from Emma Sessions? What did she

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