It did not occur to her till Mr. Wilkins developed nervous indigestion by trying to "break in" a new secretary who couldn't tell a blue-print from a set of specifications, that he had his side in the perpetual struggle between ill-paid failure employers and ill-paid ambitious employees. She was sorry for him as she watched him putter, and she helped him; stayed late, and powerfully exhorted her successor. Mr. Wilkins revived and hoped that she would stay another week, but stay she could not. Once she knew that she was able to break away from the scrub-rag, that specter of the wash-room, and the bleak, frosted glass on the semi-partition in front of her desk, no wage could have helped her. Every moment here was an edged agony. In this refusal there may have been a trace of aspiration. Otherwise the whole affair was a hodge-podge of petty people and ignoble motives--of Una and Wilkins and S. Herbert Ross and Bessie Kraker, who married a mattress-renovator, and Bessie's successor; of fifteen dollars a week, and everybody trying to deceive everybody else; of vague reasons for going, and vaguer reasons for letting Una go, and no reason at all for her remaining; in all, an ascent from a scrub-rag to a glorified soap-factory designed to provide Mr. Pemberton's daughters-in-law with motors. So long as her world was ruled by chance, half-training, and lack of clear purpose, how could it be other than a hodge-podge? § 2 She could not take as a holiday the two weeks intervening between the Wilkins office and Pemberton's. When she left Wilkins's, exulting, "This is the last time I'll ever go down in one of these rickety elevators," she had, besides her fifteen dollars in salary, one dollar and seventeen cents in the savings-bank. Mamie Magen gave her the opportunity to spend the two weeks installing a modern filing-system at Herzfeld & Cohn's. So Una had a glimpse of the almost beautiful thing business can be. Herzfeld and Cohn were Jews, old, white-bearded, orthodox Jews; their unpoetic business was the jobbing of iron beds; and Una was typical of that New York which the Jews are conquering, in having nebulous prejudices against the race; in calling them "mean" and "grasping" and "un-American," and wanting to see them shut out of offices and hotels.