The aristocrats among them, she found, were the wives of traveling salesmen, good husbands and well loved, most of them, writing to their wives daily and longing for the time when they could have places in the suburbs, with room for chickens and children and love. These aristocrats mingled only with the sound middle-class of the hotel women, whose husbands were clerks and bookkeepers resident in the city, or traveling machinery experts who went about installing small power-plants. They gossiped with Una about the husbands of the _déclassé_ women--men suspected to be itinerant quack doctors, sellers of dubious mining or motor stock, or even crooks and gamblers. There was a group of three or four cheery, buxom, much-bediamonded, much-massaged women, whose occasionally appearing husbands were sleek and overdressed. To Una these women were cordial. They invited her to go shopping, to matinées. But they stopped so often for cocktails, they told so many intimate stories of their relations with their husbands, that Una was timid before them, and edged away from their invitations except when she was desperately lonely. Doubtless she learned more about the mastery of people from them, however, than from the sighing, country-bred hotel women of whom she was more fond; for the cheerful hussies had learned to make the most of their shoddy lives. Only one woman in the hotel did Una accept as an actual friend--Mrs. Wade, a solid, slangy, contented woman with a child to whom she was devoted. She had, she told Una, "been stuck with a lemon of a husband. He was making five thousand a year when I married him, and then he went to pieces. Good-looking, but regular poor white trash. So I cleaned house--kicked him out. He's in Boston now. Touches me for a ten-spot now and then. I support myself and the kid by working for a department store. I'm a wiz at bossing dressmakers--make a Lucile gown out of the rind of an Edam cheese. Take nothing off nobody--especially you don't see me taking any more husbands off nobody." Mostly, Una was able to make out an existence by herself. She read everything--from the lacy sentimentalism of Myrtle Read to Samuel Butler and translations of Gorky and Flaubert. She nibbled at histories of art, and was confirmed in her economic theology by shallow but earnest manuals of popular radicalism. She got books from a branch public library, or picked them up at second-hand stalls. At first she was determined to be "serious" in her reading, but more and more she took light fiction as a drug to numb her nerves--and forgot the tales as soon as she had read them. In ten years of such hypnotic reading Mrs. Una Golden Schwirtz would not be very different from that Mrs. Captain Golden who, alone in a flat, had read all day, and forgotten what she had read, and let life dream into death. But now Una was still fighting to keep in life.