Only--you aren't a Lincoln or an Edison, for the most part, and you don't do any of those improving things. You have the office with you, in you, every hour of the twenty-four, unless you sleep dreamlessly and forget--which you don't. Probably, like Una, you do not take any exercise to drive work-thoughts away. She often planned to take exercise regularly; read of it in women's magazines. But she could never get herself to keep up the earnest clowning of bedroom calisthenics; gymnasiums were either reekingly crowded or too expensive--and even to think of undressing and dressing for a gymnasium demanded more initiative than was left in her fagged organism. There was walking--but city streets become tiresomely familiar. Of sports she was consistently ignorant. So all the week she was in the smell and sound of the battle, until Saturday evening with its blessed rest--the clean, relaxed time which every woman on the job knows. Saturday evening! No work to-morrow! A prospect of thirty-six hours of freedom. A leisurely dinner, a languorous slowness in undressing, a hot bath, a clean nightgown, and fresh, smooth bed-linen. Una went to bed early to enjoy the contemplation of these luxuries. She even put on a lace bed-cap adorned with pink silk roses. The pleasure of relaxing in bed, of looking lazily at the pictures in a new magazine, of drifting into slumber--not of stepping into a necessary sleep that was only the anteroom of another day's labor.... Such was her greatest joy in this period of uneventfulness. § 5 Una was, she hoped, "trying to think about things." Naturally, one who used that boarding-house phrase could not think transformingly. She wasn't illuminative about Romain Rolland or Rodin or village welfare. She was still trying to decide whether the suffrage movement was ladylike and whether Dickens or Thackeray was the better novelist. But she really was trying to decide. She compiled little lists of books to read, "movements" to investigate. She made a somewhat incoherent written statement of what she was trying to do, and this she kept in her top bureau drawer, among the ribbons, collars, imitation pearl necklaces, handkerchiefs, letters from Walter, and photographs of Panama and her mother. She took it out sometimes, and relieved the day's accumulated suffering by adding such notes as: "Be nice & human w. employes if ever have any of own; office wretched hole anyway bec. of econ. system; W. used to say, why make worse by being cranky." Or: "Study music, it brings country and W. and poetry and everything; take piano les. when get time." So Una tramped, weary always at dusk, but always recreated at dawn, through one of those periods of timeless, unmarked months, when all drama seems past and unreal and apparently nothing will ever happen again. Then, in one week, everything became startling--she found melodrama and a place of friendship. CHAPTER XI