Yet, when Una returned to the flat, something was gone. She tried to concentrate on thought about immortality. She found that she had absolutely no facts upon which to base her thought. The hundreds of good, sound, orthodox sermons she had heard gave her nothing but vague pictures of an eternal church supper somewhere in the clouds--nothing, blankly and terribly nothing, that answered her bewildered wonder as to what had become of the spirit which had been there and now was gone. In the midst of her mingling of longing and doubt she realized that she was hungry, and she rather regretted having refused Mrs. Sessions's invitation to dinner. She moved slowly about the kitchen. The rheumatic old canary hobbled along the floor of his cage and tried to sing. At that Una wept, "She never will hear poor Dickie sing again." Instantly she remembered--as clearly as though she were actually listening to the voice and words--that her mother had burst out, "Drat that bird, it does seem as if every time I try to take a nap he just tries to wake me up." Una laughed grimly. Hastily she reproved herself, "Oh, but mother didn't mean--" But in memory of that healthily vexed voice, it seemed less wicked to take notice of food, and after a reasonable dinner she put on her kimono and bedroom slippers, carefully arranged the pillows on the couch, and lay among them, meditating on her future. For half an hour she was afire with an eager thought: "Why can't I really make a success of business, now that I can entirely devote myself to it? There's women--in real estate, and lawyers and magazine editors--some of them make ten thousand a year." So Una Golden ceased to live a small-town life in New York; so she became a genuine part of the world of offices; took thought and tried to conquer this new way of city-dwelling. "Maybe I can find out if there's anything in life--now--besides working for T. W. till I'm scrapped like an old machine," she pondered. "How I hate letters about two-family houses in Flatbush!" She dug her knuckles into her forehead in the effort to visualize the problem of the hopeless women in industry. She was an Average Young Woman on a Job; she thought in terms of money and offices; yet she was one with all the men and women, young and old, who were creating a new age. She was nothing in herself, yet as the molecule of water belongs to the ocean, so Una Golden humbly belonged to the leaven who, however confusedly, were beginning to demand, "Why, since we have machinery, science, courage, need we go on tolerating war and poverty and caste and uncouthness, and all that sheer clumsiness?" Part II THE OFFICE CHAPTER IX The effect of grief is commonly reputed to be noble. But mostly it is a sterile nobility. Witness the widows who drape their musty weeds over all the living; witness the mother of a son killed in war who urges her son's comrades to bring mourning to the mothers of all the sons on the other side.