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Schwirtz's demands on the novelists, one could scarce even suggest the most dreadful scene in Una's life, lest it be supposed that other women really are subject to such horror, or that the statistics regarding immoral diseases really mean anything in households such as we ourselves know.... She had reason to suppose that her husband was damaged goods.
"You used to be plenty glad to go to poker parties and leg-shows with me, when I wanted to, but since you've taken to earning your living again you've become so ip-de-dee and independent that when I even suggest rushing a growler of beer you scowl at me, and as good as say you're too damn almighty good for Eddie Schwirtz's low-brow amusements.
Fein came to dinner, there were two tremendous secrets: For her personal life, her life outside the office, she had found a way out such as might, perhaps, solve the question of loneliness for the thousands of other empty-hearted, fruitlessly aging office-women. Not love of a man. She would rather die than have Schwirtz's clumsy feet trampling her reserve again.
Saw with just such distinctness as had once dangled the stiff, gray scrub-rag before her eyes Schwirtz's every detail: bushy chin, stained and collarless shirt, trousers like old chair-covers. Probably he would always be like this. Probably he would never have another job. But she couldn't cast him out. She had married him, in his own words, as a "good provider."
Schwirtz's low conversation.... She was not vastly different from a young lady just back in Panama from a term in the normal school, with new lights derived from a gentlemanly young English teacher with poetic interests and a curly mustache. "Sure," affirmed Mr. Schwirtz, "I like poetry fine. Used to read it myself when I was traveling out of St.
Harriet Fike of the Home Club, of dreams and work and the fight for suffrage. Una's marriage slipped away she was ardent and unstained again. Mamie's nod was worth months of Mr. Schwirtz's profuse masculine boasts. Within ten days, Mamie's friend, Mr. Fein, of Truax & Fein, the real-estate people, sent for Una and introduced her to Mr. Daniel T. Truax.
Conceive Una if through the fumes of cheap cigarettes you can make out the low lights of her fading hair sitting there, trying patiently to play a "good, canny fist of poker" which, as her husband often and irritably assured her, she would never learn to do. He didn't, he said, mind her losing his "good, hard-earned money," but he "hated to see Eddie Schwirtz's own wife more of a boob than Mrs.
Schwirtz's barbered, unexercised, coffee-soaked, tobacco-filled, whisky-rotted, fattily degenerated city body shone through his red-veined eyes. He was having a fête champêtre. He gathered berries and sang all that he remembered of "Nut Brown Ale," and chased a cow and pantingly stopped under a tree and smoked a cigar as though he enjoyed it. In his simple pleasure Una was glad.
Schwirtz's prosperous-looking solidness, and almost persuaded herself that his jowls and the slabs of fat along his neck were powerful muscles. He asked her to play croquet. Una played a game which had been respected in the smartest croqueting circles of Panama; she defeated him; and while she blushed and insisted that he ought to have won, Mr.
"No, I couldn't I can't sing a note," Una said, delightedly.... She had laughed very much at Mr. Schwirtz's humor. She slid down in her chair and felt more expansively peaceful than she ever had been in the stress of Walter Babson. "Straight, now, little sister. Own up.
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