Una stood with a hulking man pressing as close to her side as he dared, and a dapper clerkling squeezed against her breast. Above her head, to represent the city's culture and graciousness, there were advertisements of soap, stockings, and collars. At curves the wheels ground with a long, savage whine, the train heeled, and she was flung into the arms of the grinning clerk, who held her tight. She, who must never be so unladylike as to enter a polling-place, had breathed into her very mouth the clerkling's virile electoral odor of cigarettes and onions and decayed teeth. A very good thing, the Subway. It did make Una quiver with the beginnings of rebellious thought as no suave preacher could ever have done. Almost hysterically she resented this daily indignity, which smeared her clean, cool womanhood with a grease of noise and smell and human contact. As was the Subway, so were her noons of elbowing to get impure food in restaurants. For reward she was permitted to work all day with Troy Wilkins. And for heavens and green earth, she had a chair and a desk. But the human organism, which can modify itself to arctic cold and Indian heat, to incessant labor or the long enervation of luxury, learns to endure. Unwilling dressing, lonely breakfast, the Subway, dull work, lunch, sleepiness after lunch, the hopelessness of three o'clock, the boss's ill-tempers, then the Subway again, and a lonely flat with no love, no creative work; and at last a long sleep so that she might be fresh for such another round of delight. So went the days. Yet all through them she found amusement, laughed now and then, and proved the heroism as well as the unthinking servility of the human race. § 2 The need of feeling that there were people near to her urged Una to sell her furniture and move from the flat to a boarding-house. She avoided Mrs. Sessions's advice. She was sure that Mrs. Sessions would bustle about and find her a respectable place where she would have to be cheery. She didn't want to be cheery. She wanted to think. She even bought a serious magazine with articles. Not that she read it. But she was afraid to be alone any more. Anyway, she would explore the city. Of the many New Yorks, she had found only Morningside Park, Central Park, Riverside Drive, the shopping district, the restaurants and theaters which Walter had discovered to her, a few down-town office streets, and her own arid region of flats. She did not know the proliferating East Side, the factories, the endless semi-suburban stretches--nor Fifth Avenue. Her mother and Mrs. Sessions had inculcated in her the earnest idea that most parts of New York weren't quite nice. In over two years in the city she had never seen a millionaire nor a criminal; she knew the picturesqueness neither of wealth nor of pariah poverty.