Una stared at herself in the mirror over the bureau, and said, aloud: "I don't believe it! It isn't you, Una Golden, that worked, and paid your debts. You can't, dear, you simply _can't_ be the wife of a man who lives by begging--a dirty, useless, stupid beggar. Oh, no, no! You wouldn't do that--you _couldn't_ marry a man like that simply because the job had exhausted you. Why, you'd die at work first. Why, if you married him for board and keep, you'd be a prostitute--you'd be marrying him just because he was a 'good provider.' And probably, when he didn't provide any more, you'd be quitter enough to leave him--maybe for another man. You couldn't do that. I don't believe life could bully you into doing that.... Oh, I'm hysterical; I'm mad. I can't believe I am what I am--and yet I am!... Now he's getting that fifty and buying a drink--" § 4 Mr. Schwirtz actually came home with forty-five out of the fifty intact. That was because he wanted to be able to pay the hotel-manager and insultingly inform him that they were going to leave.... The manager bore up under the blow.... They did move to a "furnished housekeeping-room" on West Nineteenth Street--in the very district of gray rooms and pathetic landladies where Una had sought a boarding-house after the death of her mother. As furnished housekeeping-rooms go, theirs was highly superior. Most of them are carpetless, rusty and small of coal-stove, and filled with cockroaches and the smell of carbolic acid. But the _maison_ Schwirtz was almost clean. It had an impassioned green carpet, a bedspring which scarcely sagged at all, a gas-range, and at least a dozen vases with rococo handles and blobs of gilt. "Gee! this ain't so bad," declared Mr. Schwirtz. "We can cook all our eats here, and live on next to nothing per, till the big job busts loose." With which he prepared to settle down to a life of leisure. He went out and bought a pint of whisky, a pound of steak, a pound of cheese, a loaf of bread, six cigars, and for her a bar of fudge. So far as Una could calculate, he had less than forty dollars. She burst out on him. She seemed to be speaking with the brusque voice of an accomplishing man. In that voice was all she had ever heard from executives; all the subconsciously remembered man-driving force of the office world. She ordered him to go and take the job in the paint-shop--at eighteen dollars a week, or eight dollars a week. She briefly, but thoroughly, depicted him as alcohol-soaked, poor white trash. She drove him out, and when he was gone she started to make their rooms presentable, with an energy she had not shown for months. She began to dust, to plan curtains for the room, to plan to hide the bric-à-brac, to plan to rent a typewriter and get commercial copying to do.