She raised her head to consider a noise overhead--the faint, domestic thunder of a sewing-machine shaking the walls with its rhythm. The machine stopped. She heard the noise of scissors dropped on the floor--the most stuffily domestic sound in the world. The airless house was crushing her. She sprang up--and then she sat down again. There was no place to which she could flee. Henry Carson and the district school were menacing her. And meantime she had to find out what her mother was sewing--whether she had again been wasting money in buying mourning. "Poor, poor little mother, working away happy up there, and I've got to go and scold you," Una agonized. "Oh, I want to earn money, I want to earn real money for you." She saw a quadrangle of white on the table, behind a book. She pounced on it. It was a letter from Mrs. Sessions, and Una scratched it open excitedly. Mr. and Mrs. Albert Sessions, of Panama, had gone to New York. Mr. Sessions was in machinery. They liked New York. They lived in a flat and went to theaters. Mrs. Sessions was a pillowy soul whom Una trusted. "Why don't you," wrote Mrs. Sessions, "if you don't find the kind of work you want in Panama, think about coming up to New York and taking stenography? There are lots of chances here for secretaries, etc." Una carefully laid down the letter. She went over and straightened her mother's red wool slippers. She wanted to postpone for an exquisite throbbing moment the joy of announcing to herself that she had made a decision. She _would_ go to New York, become a stenographer, a secretary to a corporation president, a rich woman, free, responsible. The fact of making this revolutionary decision so quickly gave her a feeling of power, of already being a business woman. She galloped up-stairs to the room where her mother was driving the sewing-machine. "Mumsie!" she cried, "we're going to New York! I'm going to learn to be a business woman, and the little mother will be all dressed in satin and silks, and dine on what-is-it and peaches and cream--the poem don't come out right, but, oh, my little mother, we're going out adventuring, we are!" She plunged down beside her mother, burrowed her head in her mother's lap, kissed that hand whose skin was like thinnest wrinkly tissue-paper. "Why, my little daughter, what is it? Has some one sent for us? Is it the letter from Emma Sessions? What did she say in it?" "She suggested it, but we are going up independent." "But can we afford to?... I would like the draymas and art-galleries and all!" "We _will_ afford to! We'll gamble, for once!" CHAPTER II