Save once or twice a week, when he roared, and once or twice a month, when she felt that thirteen dollars a week was too little, she rather liked Mr. Wilkins--his honesty, his desire to make comfortable homes for people, his cheerful "Good-morning!" his way of interrupting dictation to tell her antiquated but jolly stories, his stolid, dependable-looking face. She had real satisfaction in the game of work--in winning points and tricks in doing her work briskly and well, in helping Mr. Wilkins to capture clients. She was eager when she popped in to announce to him that a wary, long-pursued "prospect" had actually called. She was rather more interested in her day's work than are the average of meaningless humanity who sell gingham and teach algebra and cure boils and repair lawn-mowers, because she was daily more able to approximate perfection, to look forward to something better--to some splendid position at twenty or even twenty-five dollars a week. She was certainly in no worse plight than perhaps ninety-five million of her free and notoriously red-blooded fellow-citizens. But she was in no better plight. There was no drama, no glory in affection, nor, so long as she should be tied to Troy Wilkins's dwindling business, no immediate increase in power. And the sameness, the unceasing discussions with Bessie regarding Mr. Wilkins--Mr. Wilkins's hat, Mr. Wilkins's latest command, Mr. Wilkins's lost fountain-pen, Mr. Wilkins's rudeness to the salesman for the Sky-line Roofing Company, Mr. Wilkins's idiotic friendship for Muldoon, the contractor, Mr. Wilkins's pronounced unfairness to the office-boy in regard to a certain lateness in arrival-- At best, Una got through day after day; at worst, she was as profoundly bored as an explorer in the arctic night. § 4 Una, the initiate New-Yorker, continued her study of city ways and city currents during her lunch-hours. She went down to Broad Street to see the curb market; marveled at the men with telephones in little coops behind opened windows; stared at the great newspaper offices on Park Row, the old City Hall, the mingling on lower Broadway of sky-challenging buildings with the history of pre-Revolutionary days. She got a momentary prejudice in favor of socialism from listening to an attack upon it by a noon-time orator--a spotted, badly dressed man whose favorite slur regarding socialists was that they were spotted and badly dressed. She heard a negro shouting dithyrambics about some religion she could never make out.