She planned that when she should succeed they would have such an apartment of white enamel and glass doors and mahogany as she saw described in the women's magazines. She realized mentally that her mother must be lonely in the long hours of waiting for her return, but she who was busy all day could never feel emotionally how great was that loneliness, and she expected her mother to be satisfied with the future. Quite suddenly, a couple of weeks after the dance, when they were talking about the looming topic--what kind of work Una would be able to get when she should have completed school--her mother fell violently a-weeping; sobbed, "Oh, Una baby, I want to go home. I'm so lonely here--just nobody but you and the Sessionses. Can't we go back to Panama? You don't seem to really know what you _are_ going to do." "Why, mother--" Una loved her mother, yet she felt a grim disgust, rather than pity.... Just when she had been working so hard! And for her mother as much as for herself.... She stalked over to the table, severely rearranged the magazines, slammed down a newspaper, and turned, angrily. "Why, can't you see? I _can't_ give up my work now." "Couldn't you get something to do in Panama, dearie?" "You know perfectly well that I tried." "But maybe now, with your college course and all--even if it took a little longer to get something there, we'd be right among the folks we know--" "Mother, can't you understand that we have only a little over three hundred dollars now? If we moved again and everything, we wouldn't have two hundred dollars to live on. Haven't you _any_ sense of finances?" "You must not talk to me that way, my daughter!" A slim, fine figure of hurt-dignity, Mrs. Golden left the room, lay down in the bedroom, her face away from the door where Una stood in perplexity. Una ran to her, kissed her shoulder, begged for forgiveness. Her mother patted her cheek, and sobbed, "Oh, it doesn't matter," in a tone so forlorn and lonely that it did matter, terribly. The sadness of it tortured Una while she was realizing that her mother had lost all practical comprehension of the details of life, was become a child, trusting everything to her daughter, yet retaining a power of suffering such as no child can know. It had been easy to bring her mother here, to start a career. Both of them had preconceived a life of gaiety and beauty, of charming people and pictures and concerts. But all those graces were behind a dusty wall of shorthand and typewriting. Una's struggle in coming to New York had just begun.