"Maybe," she went on, "the business women will bring about a new kind of marriage in which men will _have_ to keep up respect and courtesy.... I wonder--I wonder how many millions of women in what are supposed to be happy homes are sick over being chambermaids and mistresses till they get dulled and used to it. Nobody will ever know. All these books about women being emancipated--you'd think marriage had changed entirely. Yet, right now, in 1912, in Panama and this hotel--not changed a bit. The business women must simply _compel_ men to--oh, to shave!" She went out (perhaps she slammed the door a little, in an unemancipated way) to Mrs. Wade's room. That discussion was far more gentle and coherent than most of their quarrels. It may have been rather to the credit of Mr. Schwirtz--it may have been a remnant of the clean pride which the boy Eddie Schwirtz must once have had, that, whenever she hinted that she would like to go back to work--he raged: "So you think I can't support you, eh? My God! I can stand insults from all my old friends--the fellas that used to be tickled to death to have me buy 'em a drink, but now they dodge around the corner as though they thought I was going to try to borrow four bits from 'em--I can stand their insults, but, by God! it _is_ pretty hard on a man when his own wife lets him know that she don't think he can support her!" And he meant it. She saw that, felt his resentment. But she more and more often invited an ambition to go back to work, to be independent and busy, no matter how weary she might become. To die, if need be, in the struggle. Certainly that death would be better than being choked in muck.... One of them would have to go to work, anyway. She discovered that an old acquaintance of his had offered him an eighteen-dollar-a-week job as a clerk in a retail paint-shop, till he should find something better. Mr. Schwirtz was scornful about it, and his scorn, which had once intimidated Una, became grotesquely absurd to her. Then the hotel-manager came with a curt ultimatum: "Pay up or get out," he said. Mr. Schwirtz spent an hour telephoning to various acquaintances, trying to raise another hundred dollars. He got the promise of fifty. He shaved, put on a collar that for all practical purposes was quite clean, and went out to collect his fifty as proudly as though he had earned it.