"Lord! it's over for me," she thought. "Fifty more weeks of the job before I can get away again--a whole year. Vacation is farther from me now than ever. And the same old grind.... Let's see, I've got to get in touch with the Adine Company for Mr. Wilkins before I even do any filing in the morning--" She awoke, after midnight, and worried: "I _mustn't_ forget to get after the Adine Company, the very first thing in the morning. And Mr. Wilkins has _got_ to get Bessie and me a waste-basket apiece. Oh, Lord! I wish Eddie Schwirtz were going to take me out for a walk to-morrow, the old darling that he is-- I'd walk _anywhere_ rather than ask Mr. Wilkins for those blame waste-baskets!" CHAPTER XIV Mrs. Esther Lawrence was, she said, bored by the general atmosphere of innocent and bounding girlhood at the Temperance Home Club, and she persuaded Una to join her in taking a flat--three small rooms--which they made attractive with Japanese toweling and Russian, or at least Russian-Jew, brassware. Here Mrs. Lawrence's men came calling, and sometimes Mr. Julius Edward Schwirtz, and all of them, except Una herself, had cigarettes and highballs, and Una confusedly felt that she was getting to be an Independent Woman. Then, in January, 1909, she left the stiff, gray scrub-rag which symbolized the routine of Mr. Troy Wilkins's office. In a magazine devoted to advertising she had read that Mr. S. Herbert Ross, whom she had known as advertising-manager of the _Gas and Motor Gazette_, had been appointed advertising-manager for Pemberton's--the greatest manufactory of drugs and toilet articles in the world. Una had just been informed by Mr. Wilkins that, while he had an almost paternal desire to see her successful financially and otherwise, he could never pay her more than fifteen dollars a week. He used a favorite phrase of commuting captains of commerce: "Personally, I'd be glad to pay you more, but fifteen is all the position is worth." She tried to persuade him that there is no position which cannot be made "worth more." He promised to "think it over." He was still taking a few months to think it over--while her Saturday pay-envelope remained as thin as ever--when Bessie Kraker resigned, to marry a mattress-renovator, and in Bessie's place Mr. Wilkins engaged a tall, beautiful blonde, who was too much of a lady to take orders from Una. This wrecked Una's little office home, and she was inspired to write to Mr. S. Herbert Ross at Pemberton's, telling him what a wise, good, noble, efficient man he was, and how much of a privilege it would be to become his secretary. She felt that Walter Babson must have been inexact in ever referring to Mr. Ross as "Sherbet Souse."