Despite Mr. Fein's picture of the woes of executives, Una found that her new power and responsibility were inspiring as her little stenographer's wage had never been. Nor, though she did have trouble with the women responsible to her at times, though she found it difficult to secure employees on whom she could depend, did Una become a female Troy Wilkins. She was able to work out some of the aspirations she had cloudily conceived when she had herself been a slave. She did find it possible to be friendly with her aides, to be on tea and luncheon and gossip terms of intimacy with them, to confide in them instead of tricking them, to use frank explanations instead of arbitrary rules; and she was rewarded by their love and loyalty. Her chief quarrels were with Mr. Truax in regard to raising the salaries and commissions of her assistant saleswomen. Behind all these discoveries regarding the state of being an executive, behind her day's work and the evenings at her flat when Mamie Magen and Mr. Fein came to dinner, there were two tremendous secrets: For her personal life, her life outside the office, she had found a way out such as might, perhaps, solve the question of loneliness for the thousands of other empty-hearted, fruitlessly aging office-women. Not love of a man. She would rather die than have Schwirtz's clumsy feet trampling her reserve again. And the pleasant men who came to her flat were--just pleasant. No, she told herself, she did not need a man or man's love. But a child's love and presence she did need. She was going to adopt a child. That was her way out. She was thirty-four now, but by six of an afternoon she felt forty. Youth she would find--youth of a child's laughter, and the healing of its downy sleep. She took counsel with Mamie Magen (who immediately decided to adopt a child also, and praised Una as a discoverer) and with the good housekeeping women she knew at Crosshampton Harbor. She was going to be very careful. She would inspect a dozen different orphan-asylums. Meanwhile her second secret was making life pregnant with interest: She was going to change her job again--for the last time she hoped. She was going to be a creator, a real manager, unhampered by Mr. Truax's unwillingness to accept women as independent workers and by the growing animosity of Mrs. Truax. § 3 Una's interest in the Year-Round Inn at Crosshampton Harbor, the results obtained by reasonably good meals and a little chintz, and her memory of the family hotel, had led her attention to the commercial possibilities of innkeeping.