There was the super-chief, the one person related to the firm whom Una hated--Mrs. D. T. Truax. She was not officially connected with the establishment, and her office habits were irregular. Mostly they consisted in appearing at the most inconvenient hours and asking maddening questions. She was fat, ma.s.saged, glittering, wheezy-voiced, nagging. Una peculiarly hated Mrs. Truax's nails. Una's own finger-tips were hard with typing; her manicuring was a domestic matter of clipping and hypocritical filing. But to Mrs. Truax manicuring was a life-work.

Because of much clipping of the cuticle, the flesh at the base of each nail had become a noticeably raised cushion of pink flesh. Her nails were too pink, too shiny, too shapely, and sometimes they were an unearthly white at the ends, because of nail-paste left under them. At that startling whiteness Una stared all the while Mrs. Truax was tapping her fingers and prying into the private morals of the pretty hall-girl, and enfilading Una with the lorgnon that so perfectly suited her Upper West Side jowls.

Collating Mrs. Truax and the matrons of the Visiting Board of the Temperance Home Club, Una concluded that women trained in egotism, but untrained in business, ought to be legally enjoined from giving their views to young women on the job.

The most interesting figure in the office was Mr. Fein, the junior partner, a Harvard Jew, who was perfectly the new type of business man.

Serious, tall, spectacled, clean-shaven, lean-faced, taking business as a profession, and kindly justice as a religion, studying efficiency, but hating the metamorphosis of clerks into machines, he was the distinction and the power of Truax & Fein. At first Una had thought him humorless and negligible, but she discovered that it was he who pulled Mr. Truax out of his ruts, his pious trickeries, his cramping economies. She found that Mr. Fein loved books and the opera, and that he could be boyish after hours.

Then the sales-manager, that driving but festive soul, Mr. Charles Salmond, whom everybody called "Chas."--p.r.o.nounced "Chaaz"--a good soul who was a little tiresome because he was so consistently an anthology of New York. He believed in Broadway, the Follies, good clothes, a motor-car, Palm Beach, and the value of the Salvation Army among the lower cla.s.ses. When Mr. Fein fought for real beauty in their suburban developments it was Chas. who echoed all of New York by rebelling, "We aren't in business for our health--this idealistic game is O. K. for the guys that have the cash, but you can't expect my salesmen to sell this Simplicity and High-Thinking stuff to prospects that are interested in nothing but a sound investment with room for a garage and two kids."

Sixty or seventy salesmen, clerks, girls--these Una was beginning to know.

Finally, there was a keen, wide-awake woman, willing to do anything for anybody, not forward, but not to be overridden--a woman with a slight knowledge of architecture and a larger knowledge of the way of promotion; a woman whom Una took seriously; and the name of this paragon was Mrs. Una Golden Schwirtz.

Round these human islands flowed a sea of others. She had a sense of flux, and change, and energy; of hundreds of thousands of people rushing about her always--crowds on Broadway and Fifth Avenue and Sixth, and on Thirty-fourth Street, where stood the Zodiac Building in which was the office. Crowds in the hall of the Zodiac Building, examining the black-and-white directory board with its list of two hundred offices, or waiting to surge into one of the twelve elevators--those packed vertical railroads. A whole village life in the hallway of the Zodiac Building: the imperial elevator-starter in a uniform of blue and gold, and merely regal elevator-runners with less gold and more faded blue; the oldest of the elevator-boys, Harry, the Greek, who knew everybody in the building; the cigar-stand, with piles of cigarettes, cans of advertised tobacco, maple fudge wrapped in tinfoil, stamps, and even a few cigars, also the keeper thereof, an Italian with an air of swounding romance. More romantic Italians in the gla.s.s-inclosed barber-shop--Desperate Desmond devils, with white coats like undress uniforms, and mustaches that recalled the Riviera and baccarat and a secret-service count; the two manicure-girls of the barber-shop, princesses reigning among admirers from the offices up-stairs; janitors, with brooms, and charwomen with pails, and a red, sarcastic man, the engineer, and a meek puppet who was merely the superintendent of the whole thing.... Una watched these village people, to whom the Zodiac hall was Main Street, and in their satisfied conformation to a life of marble floors and artificial light she found such settled existence as made her feel at home in this town, with its eighteen strata called floors. She, too, at least during the best hours of the day, lived in the Zodiac Building's microcosm.

And to her office penetrated the ever flowing crowds--salesmen, buyers of real estate, inquirers, persons who seemed to have as a hobby the collection of real-estate folders. Indeed, her most important task was the strategy of "handling callers"--the callers who came to see Mr.

Truax himself, and were pa.s.sed on to Una by the hall-girl. To the clever secretary the management of callers becomes a question of scientific tactics, and Una was clever at it because she liked people.

She had to recognize the type of awkward shabby visitor who looks like a beggar, but has in his pocket the cash for investment in lots. And the insinuating caller, with tailor-made garments and a smart tie, who presents himself as one who yearns to do a good turn to his dear, dear personal friend, Mr. D. T. Truax, but proves to be an insurance-agent or a salesman of adding-machines. She had to send away the women with high-pitched voices and purely imaginary business, who came in for nothing whatever, and were willing to spend all of their own time and Mr. Truax's in obtaining the same; women with unsalable houses to sell or improbable lots to buy, dissatisfied clients, or mere cranks--old, shattered, unhappy women, to whom Una could give sympathy, but no time.... She was expert at standing filially listening to them at the elevator, while all the time her thumb steadily pressed the elevator signal.

Una had been trained, perhaps as much by enduring Mr. Schwirtz as by pleasing Mr. S. Herbert Ross, to be firm, to say no, to keep Mr. Truax's sacred rites undisturbed. She did not conventionally murmur, "Mr. Truax is in a conference just now, and if you will tell me the nature of your business--" Instead, she had surprising, delightful, convincing things for Mr. Truax to be doing, just at that particular _moment_--

From Mr. Truax himself she learned new ways of delicately getting rid of people. He did not merely rise to indicate that an interview was over, but also arranged a system of counterfeit telephone-calls, with Una calling up from the outside office, and Mr. Truax answering, "Yes, I'll be through now in just a moment," as a hint for the visitor. He even practised such play-acting as putting on his hat and coat and rushing out to greet an important but unwelcome caller with, "Oh, I'm so sorry I'm just going out--late f' important engagement--given m' secretary full instructions, and I know she'll take care of you jus' as well as I could personally," and returning to his private office by a rear door.

Mr. Truax, like Mr. S. Herbert Ross, gave Una maxims. But his had very little to do with stars and argosies, and the road to success, and vivisection, and the abstract virtues. They concerned getting to the office on time, and never letting a customer bother him if an office salesman could take care of the matter.

So round Una flowed all the energy of life; and she of the listening and desolate hotel room and the overshadowing storm-clouds was happy again.

She began to make friendships. "Chas.," the office-manager, stopped often at her desk to ridicule--and Mr. Fein to praise--the plans she liked to make for garden-suburbs which should be filled with poets, thatched roofs, excellent plumbing, artistic conversation, fireplaces, incinerators, books, and convenient trains.

"Some day," said Mr. Fein to her, "we'll do that sort of thing, just as the Sage Foundation is doing it at Forest Hills." And he smiled encouragingly.

"Some day," said Mr. Truax, "when you're head of a women's real-estate firm, after you women get the vote, and rusty, old-fashioned people like me are out of the way, perhaps you can do that sort of thing." And he smiled encouragingly.

"Rot," said Chas., and amiably chucked her under the chin.

CHAPTER XX

Truax & Fein was the first firm toward which Una was able to feel such loyalty as is supposed to distinguish all young aspirants--loyalty which is so well spoken of by bosses, and which is so generally lacking among the bossed. Partly, this was her virtue, partly it was the firm's, and partly it was merely the accident of her settling down.

She watched the biological growth of Truax & Fein with fascination; was excited when they opened a new subdivision, and proudly read the half-page advertis.e.m.e.nts thereof in the Sunday newspapers.

That loyalty made her study real estate, not merely stenography; for to most stenographers their work is the same whether they take dictation regarding real estate, or book-publishing, or felt slippers, or the removal of taconite. They understand transcription, but not what they transcribe. She read magazines--_System_, _Printer's Ink_, _Real Estate Record_ (solemnly studying "Recorded Conveyances," and "Plans Filed for New Construction Work," and "Mechanics' Liens"). She got ideas for houses from architectural magazines, garden magazines, women's magazines. But what most indicated that she was a real devotee was the fact that, after glancing at the front-page headlines, the society news, and the joke column in her morning paper, she would resolutely turn to "The Real Estate Field."

On Sundays she often led Mr. Schwirtz for a walk among the new suburban developments.... For always, no matter what she did at the office, no matter how much Mr. Truax depended on her or Mr. Fein praised her, she went home to the same cabbage-rose-carpeted housekeeping-room, and to a Mr. Schwirtz who had seemingly not stirred an inch since she had left him in the morning.... Mr. Schwirtz was of a harem type, and not much adapted to rustic jaunting, but he obediently followed his master and tried to tell stories of the days when he had known all about real estate, while she studied model houses, the lay of the land, the lines of sewers and walks.

That was loyalty to Truax & Fein as much as desire for advancement.

And that same loyalty made her accept as fellow-workers even the noisiest of the salesmen--and even Beatrice Joline.

Though Mr. Truax didn't "believe in" women salesmen, one woman briskly overrode his beliefs: Miss Beatrice Joline, of the Gramercy Park Jolines, who cheerfully called herself "one of the _nouveau pauvre_,"

and condescended to mere Upper West Side millionaires, and had to earn her frocks and tea money. She earned them, too; but she declined to be interested in office regulations or office hours. She sold suburban homes as a free lance, and only to the very best people. She darted into the office now and then, slender, tall, shoulder-swinging, an exclamation-point of a girl, in a smart, check suit and a Bendel hat.

She ignored Una with a coolness which reduced her to the status of a new stenographer. All the office watched Miss Joline with hypnotized envy.

Always in offices those who have social position outside are observed with secret awe by those who have not.

Once, when Mr. Truax was in the act of persuading an unfortunate property-owner to part with a Long Island estate for approximately enough to buy one lot after the estate should be subdivided into six hundred lots, Miss Joline had to wait. She perched on Una's desk, outside Mr. Truax's door, swung her heels, inspected the finger-ends of her chamois gloves, and issued a command to Una to perform conversationally.

Una was thinking, "I'd like to spank you--and then I'd adore you. You're what story-writers call a thoroughbred."

While unconscious that a secretary in a tabby-gray dress and gold eye-gla.s.ses was venturing to appraise her, Miss Joline remarked, in a high, clear voice: "Beastly bore to have to wait, isn't it! I suppose you can rush right in to see Mr. Truax any time you want to, Mrs.

Ummmmm."

"Schwirtz. Rotten name, isn't it?" Una smiled up condescendingly.

Miss Joline stopped kicking her heels and stared at Una as though she might prove to be human, after all.

"Oh no, it's a very nice name," she said. "Fancy being called Joline.

Now Schwirtz sounds rather like Schenck, and that's one of the smartest of the old names.... Uh, _would_ it be too much trouble to see if Mr.

Truax is still engaged?"

"He is.... Miss Joline, I feel like doing something I've wanted to do for some time. Of course we both know you think of me as 'that poor little dub, Mrs. What's-her-name, D. T.'s secretary--'"

"Why, really--"

"--or perhaps you hadn't thought of me at all. I'm naturally quite a silent little dub, but I've been learning that it's silly to be silent in business. So I've been planning to get hold of you and ask you where and how you get those suits of yours, and what I ought to wear. You see, after you marry I'll still be earning my living, and perhaps if I could dress anything like you I could fool some business man into thinking I was clever."

"As I do, you mean," said Miss Joline, cheerfully.

"Well--"

"Oh, I don't mind. But, my dear, good woman--oh, I suppose I oughtn't to call you that."

"I don't care what you call me, if you can tell me how to make a seventeen-fifty suit look like _Vogue_. Isn't it awful, Miss Joline, that us lower cla.s.ses are interested in clothes, too?"

"My dear girl, even the beautiful, the accomplished Beatrice Joline--I'll admit it--knows when she is being teased. I went to boarding-school, and if you think I haven't ever been properly and thoroughly, and oh, most painstakingly told what a disgusting, natural sn.o.b I am, you ought to have heard Tomlinson, or any other of my dear friends, taking me down. I rather fancy you're kinder-hearted than they are; but, anyway, you don't insult me half so scientifically."

"I'm so sorry. I tried hard-- I'm a well-meaning insulter, but I haven't the practice."

"My dear, I adore you. Isn't it lovely to be frank? When us females get into Mr. Truax's place we'll have the most wonderful time insulting each other, don't you think? But, really, please don't think I like to be rude. But you see we Jolines are so poor that if I stopped it all my business acquaintances would think I was admitting how poor we are, so I'm practically forced to be horrid. Now that we've been amiable to each other, what can I do for you?... Does that sound business-like enough?"

"I want to make you give me some hints about clothes. I used to like terribly crude colors, but I've settled down to tessie things that are safe--this gray dress, and brown, and black."

"Well, my dear, I'm the best little dressmaker you ever saw, and I do love to lay down the law about clothes. With your hair and complexion, you ought to wear clear blues. Order a well-made--be sure it's well-made, no matter what it costs. Get some clever little Jew socialist tailor off in the outskirts of Brooklyn, or some heathenish place, and stand over him. A well-made tailored suit of not too dark navy blue, with matching blue crepe de Chine blouses with nice, soft, white collars, and cuffs of crepe or chiffon--and change 'em often."