The problem instantly became complicated again. Perhaps she _had_ hurt his rudimentary sense of courtesy. Perhaps Walter Babson would have sympathized with Phil, not with her. She peeped at Phil. He trailed along with a forlorn baby look which did not change.

She was very uncomfortable as she said a brief good-night at the flat.

She half wished that he would give her a chance to recant. She saw him and his injured feelings as enormously important.

She undressed in a tremor of misgiving. She put her thin, pretty kimono over her nightgown, braided her hair, and curled on the bed, condemning herself for having been so supercilious to the rat who had never had a chance.

It was late--long after eleven--when there was a tapping on the door.

She started, listened rigidly.

Phil's voice whispered from the hall: "Open your door just half an inch, Miss Golden. Something I wanted to say."

Her pity for him made his pleading request like a command. She drew her kimono close and peeped out at him.

"I knew you were up," he whispered; "saw the light under your door. I been so worried. I _didn't_ mean to shock you, or nothing, but if you feel I _did_ mean to, I want to apologize. Gee! me, I couldn't sleep one wink if I thought you was offended."

"It's all right--" she began.

"Say, come into the dining-room. Everybody gone to bed. I want to explain--gee! you gotta give me a chance to be good. If _you_ don't use no good influence over me, n.o.body never will, I guess."

His whisper was full of masculine urgency, husky, bold. She shivered.

She hesitated, did not answer.

"All right," he mourned. "I don't blame you none, but it's pretty hard--"

"I'll come just for a moment," she said, and shut the door.

She was excited, flushed. She wrapped her braids around her head, gentle braids of pale gold, and her undistinguished face, thus framed, was young and sweet.

She hastened out to the dining-room.

What was the "parlor" by day the Grays used for their own bedroom, but the dining-room had a big, ugly, leather settee and two rockers, and it served as a secondary living-room.

Here Phil waited, at the end of the settee. She headed for a rocker, but he piled sofa-cushions for her at the other end of the settee, and she obediently sank down there.

"Listen," he said, in a tone of lofty lamentation, "I don't know as I can ever, _ever_ make you understand I just wanted to give you a good time. I seen you was in mourning, and I thinks, 'Maybe you could brighten her up a little--'"

"I am sorry I didn't understand."

"Una, Una! Do you suppose you could ever stoop to helping a bad egg like me?" he demanded.

His hand fell on hers. It comforted her chilly hand. She let it lie there. Speech became difficult for her.

"Why, why yes--" she stammered.

In reaction to her scorn of him, she was all accepting faith.

"Oh, if you could--and if I could make you less lonely sometimes--"

In his voice was a perilous tenderness; for the rat, trained to beguile neurotic patients in his absurd practice, could croon like the very mother of pity.

"Yes, I am lonely sometimes," she heard herself admitting--far-off, dreaming, needing the close affection that her mother and Walter had once given her.

"Poor little girl--you're so much better raised and educated than me, but you got to have friendship jus' same."

His arm was about her shoulder. For a second she leaned against him.

All her scorn of him suddenly gathered in one impulse. She sprang up--just in time to catch a grin on his face.

"You gutter-rat!" she said. "You aren't worth my telling you what you are. You wouldn't understand. You can't see anything but the gutter."

He was perfectly unperturbed: "Poor stuff, kid. Weak come-back. Sounds like a drayma. But, say, listen, honest, kid, you got me wrong. What's the harm in a little hugging--"

She fled. She was safe in her room. She stood with both arms outstretched. She did not feel soiled by this dirty thing. She was triumphant. In the silhouette of a water-tank, atop the next-door apartment-house, she saw a strong tower of faith.

"Now I don't have to worry about him. I don't have to make any more decisions. I know! I'm through! No one can get me just because of curiosity about s.e.x again. I'm free. I can fight my way through in business and still keep clean. I can! I was hungry for--for even that rat. I--Una Golden! Yes, I was. But I don't want to go back to him. I've won!

"Oh, Walter, Walter, I do want you, dear, but I'll get along without you, and I'll keep a little sacred image of you."

CHAPTER X

The three-fourths of Una employed in the office of Mr. Troy Wilkins was going through one of those periods of unchanging routine when all past drama seems unreal, when nothing novel happens nor apparently ever will happen--such a time of dull peacefulness as makes up the major part of our lives.

Her only definite impressions were the details of daily work, the physical aspects of the office, and the presence of the "Boss."

- 2

Day after day the same details of the job: letters arriving, a.s.sorted, opened, answered by dictation, the answers sealed and stamped (and almost every day the same panting crisis of getting off some cosmically important letter).... The reception of callers; welcome to clients; considerate but firm a.s.surances to persons looking for positions that there was "no opening just at _present_--" The suave answering of irritating telephone calls.... The filing of letters and plans; the clipping of real-estate-transfer items from newspapers.... The supervision of Bessie Kraker and the office-boy.

Equally fixed were the details of the grubby office itself. Like many men who have pride in the smartest suburban homes available, Mr. Wilkins was content with an office shabby and inconvenient. He regarded beautiful offices as in some way effeminate.... His wasn't effeminate; it was undecorative as a filled ash-tray, despite Una's daily following up of the careless scrubwomen with dust-cloth and whisk. She knew every inch of it, as a gardener knows his plot. She could never keep from noticing and running her finger along the pebbled gla.s.s of the oak-and-gla.s.s part.i.tion about Mr. Wilkins's private office, each of the hundreds of times a day she pa.s.sed it; and when she lay awake at midnight, her finger-tips would recall precisely the feeling of that rough surface, even to the sharp edges of a tiny flaw in the gla.s.s over the bookcase.

Or she would recall the floor-rag--symbol of the hard realness of the office grind....

It always hung over the twisted, bulbous lead pipes below the stationary basin in the women's wash-room provided by the Septimus Building for the women on three floors. It was a rag ancient and slate-gray, grotesquely stiff and grotesquely hairy at its frayed edges--a corpse of a scrub-rag in _rigor mortis_. Una was annoyed with herself for ever observing so unlovely an object, but in the moment of relaxation when she went to wash her hands she was unduly sensitive to that eternal rag, and to the griminess of the wash-room--the cracked and yellow-stained wash-bowl, the cold water that stung in winter, the roller-towel which she spun round and round in the effort to find a dry, clean, square s.p.a.ce, till, in a spasm of revulsion, she would bolt out of the wash-room with her face and hands half dried.

Woman's place is in the home. Una was doubtless purely perverse in competing with men for the commercial triumphs of running that gray, wet towel round and round on its clattering roller, and of wondering whether for the entire remainder of her life she would see that dead scrub-rag.

It was no less annoying a fact that Bessie and she had only one waste-basket, which was invariably at Bessie's desk when Una reached for it.

Or that the door of the supply-cupboard always shivered and stuck.

Or that on Thursday, which is the three P.M. of the week, it seemed impossible to endure the tedium till Sat.u.r.day noon; and that, invariably, her money was gone by Friday, so that Friday lunch was always a mere insult to her hunger, and she could never get her gloves from the cleaner till after Sat.u.r.day pay-day.

Una knew the office to a point where it offered few beautiful surprises.