The Job: An American Novel

It was hard enough to get Mr. Wilkins to set a definite date for her summer vacation; the time was delayed and juggled till Mrs. Lawrence, who was to have gone with Una, had to...

Una was so excited that she called herself a silly little fool. She seized her untouched note-book, her pencils sharpened like lances, and tried to appear a very mouse of modest...

The effect of grief is commonly reputed to be noble. But mostly it is a sterile nobility. Witness the widows who drape their musty weeds over all the living; witness the mother...

In novels and plays architects usually are delicate young men who wear silky Vandyke beards, play the piano, and do a good deal with pictures and rugs. They leap with desire to...

Mrs. Esther Lawrence was, she said, bored by the general atmosphere of innocent and bounding girlhood at the Temperance Home Club, and she persuaded Una to join her in taking a...

Except for the young man in the bank, the new young man in the hardware-store, and the proprietors of the new Broadway Clothing Shop, Una had known most of the gallants in Panam...

Truax & Fein was the first firm toward which Una was able to feel such loyalty as is supposed to distinguish all young aspirants--loyalty which is so well spoken of by bosses, a...

These children of the city, where there is no place for love-making, for discovering and testing each other's hidden beings, ran off together in the scanted parties of the ambit...

So Una simple-heartedly reflected on her way to the Subway next morning. She could not picture what he would do, now that it was hard, dry day again, and all the world panted th...

Of the year and a half from March, 1914, to the autumn of 1915, which Una spent on Long Island, as the resident salesman and director of Crosshampton Hill Gardens, this history...

"Oh yes," said Bessie, doubtfully. "Say, listen, Miss Golden. Say, I don't want to butt in, and maybe you wouldn't be stuck on it much, but they say it's a dead-swell place to l...

Captain Lew Golden would have saved any foreign observer a great deal of trouble in studying America. He was an almost perfect type of the petty small-town middle-class lawyer....

For two years Una Golden Schwirtz moved amid the blank procession of phantoms who haunt cheap family hotels, the apparitions of the corridors, to whom there is no home, nor purp...

Sanford Hunt telephoned to Una that he and Mr. Julius Edward Schwirtz--whom he called "Eddie"--had done their best to find an "opening" for her in the office of the Lowry Paint...

Mr. Julius Edward Schwirtz was a regular visitant at the flat of Mrs. Lawrence and Una. Mrs. Lawrence liked him; in his presence she abandoned her pretense of being interested i...

Late in the summer of 1912, at a time when Una did not expect the return of her husband for at least three weeks, she was in their room in the afternoon, reading "Salesmanship f...

Her old enemy, routine, was constantly in the field. Routine of taking dictation, of getting out the letters, prompting Mr. Truax's memory as to who Mrs. A was, and what Mr. B h...

The three-fourths of Una employed in the office of Mr. Troy Wilkins was going through one of those periods of unchanging routine when all past drama seems unreal, when nothing n...

That same oasis of a week gave to Una her first taste of business responsibility, of being in charge and generally comporting herself as do males. But in order to rouse her thus...

Una Golden had never realized how ugly and petty were the streets of Panama till that evening when she walked down for the mail, spurning the very dust on the sidewalks--and the...

To Una and to Mr. Fein it seemed obvious that, since women have at least half of the family decision regarding the purchase of suburban homes, women salesmen of suburban propert...

So long as Mr. Schwirtz contrived to keep his position in the retail paint-store, Una was busy at home, copying documents and specifications and form-letters for a stenographic...

"No, I didn't--but what if I had? You simply aren't the same girl I liked--you're a woman that can do things; and, honestly, you're an inspiration to me." Walter rubbed his jaw...