At first they awed her by their number and their strangeness. But when she seemed to be quite their equal in this school of the timorously clerical, she began to look at them level-eyed.... A busy, commonplace, soft-armed, pleasant, good little thing she was; glancing at them through eye-glasses attached to a gold chain over her ear, not much impressed now, slightly ashamed by the delight she took in winning their attention by brilliant recitations.... She decided that most of them were earnest-minded but intelligent serfs, not much stronger than the girls who were taking stenography for want of anything better to do. They sprawled and looked vacuous as they worked in rows in the big study-hall, with its hard blue walls showing the marks of two removed partitions, its old iron fireplace stuffed with rubbers and overshoes and crayon-boxes. As a provincial, Una disliked the many Jews among them, and put down their fervor for any sort of learning to acquisitiveness. The rest she came to despise for the clumsy slowness with which they learned even the simplest lessons. And to all of them she--who was going to be rich and powerful, directly she was good for one hundred words a minute at stenography!--felt disdainfully superior, because they were likely to be poor the rest of their lives. In a twilight walk on Washington Heights, a walk of such vigor and happy absorption with new problems as she had never known in Panama, she caught herself being contemptuous about their frayed poverty. With a sharp emotional sincerity, she rebuked herself for such sordidness, mocked herself for assuming that she was already rich. Even out of this mass of clerklings emerged two or three who were interesting: Sam Weintraub, a young, active, red-headed, slim-waisted Jew, who was born in Brooklyn. He smoked large cigars with an air, knew how to wear his clothes, and told about playing tennis at the Prospect Athletic Club. He would be a smart secretary or confidential clerk some day, Una was certain; he would own a car and be seen in evening clothes and even larger cigars at after-theater suppers. She was rather in awe of his sophistication. He was the only man who made her feel like a Freshman. J. J. Todd, a reticent, hesitating, hard-working man of thirty, from Chatham on Cape Cod. It was he who, in noon-time arguments, grimly advocated profit-sharing, which Sam Weintraub debonairly dismissed as "socialistic." And, most appealing to her, enthusiastic young Sanford Hunt, inarticulate, but longing for a chance to attach himself to some master. Weintraub and Todd had desks on either side of her; they had that great romantic virtue, propinquity. But Sanford Hunt she had noticed, in his corner across the room, because he glanced about with such boyish loneliness.