West of Fifth

Even during the latter hour of lunch time the editorial room of the _Dress Daily_ could never be quiet. The feel of the presses stayed like audible dust in the air and now and t...

The _Dress Daily_ building stood a few steps from Fifth Avenue. It was a part of Fifth Avenue, however--the section of the clothing workers--which Grace Kline always wished to e...

Learning from the elevator starter that it was half-past three, Grace faced Fifth Avenue again with a sort of sigh, not of sadness, but of anticipation that was almost too stifl...

The sunshine was gone. Lights were being turned on in office buildings. The crowds were beginning to rush home. Before dinner time in late fall--a windy, hurrying, desolate inte...

It was not long before Grace learned to disregard time in all connections with Broadway, but this first morning she took Harry Strauss's warnings to heart and saw with astonishm...

From the start, Grace had in her favor one trait without which there would be no good salesmen and no good press agents. She had little consciousness of the unexpressed rights,...

The Club Miraflore was below sidewalk level; a few steps down, an office by the window, very wide, carpeted stairs leading farther down to the cloakroom and the dance floor. The...

On the Sunday which Grace had reserved, the Moseses came home in ill humor from a vaudeville show and a walk. It was a cold November afternoon, blanketed in the lethargy of the...

When Grace had not seen Letty for a fortnight, her mind began to weave in and about various stratagems. She knew she would make her way back to their house--she had to--but her...

During the last two years of school Grace had taken her classes at the Washington Square College. Between classes, which came in the late afternoon and evening, she would cross...

It was not the child itself that mattered--that there would be a child. It was not the betrayal that mattered, the infidelity with the other woman, the wife, the very woman agai...

Anita used to have an instinct to make herself very small and very blank when she first visited Grace's house. She was such a weird phenomenon to Mrs. Kline. Rack her mind as Mr...

Every day young people came to Harry Strauss's office, armed with letters, fortified with introductions, to ask for work. Grace saw them all without appearing to see; nor had it...

When Anita returned to New York winter was in full possession--a wet winter, a sickly winter, chilling the blood into sluggish mounds, turning a gray snow into slush and mud amo...

Thus began some weeks of existence, almost without substance or foundation, like the existence of a haunting wraith. In the morning it was necessary to leave the studio bearing...

Row after row of sedate brownstone houses met Blake in his part of Brooklyn and stolidly followed his homecoming. There was no shaking them off. When he left one behind, a simil...

Not till the plant has forged through the ground can we see that the seed was fertile and events ripe for its blossoming. Thus, too, our lives are made up of accidents, chance s...

On the night Blake's play opened, as she entered the theater, the first person Anita saw was Grace. She stood at the head of the center aisle, within a little group of which she...

Grace's lunch date with Renie Harrington had to be postponed, for Renie explained that she seldom came to town during the summer. As soon as Grace heard of her return, therefore...

Not long afterward a situation in the M.A.N. office began to monopolize Grace's conversations with her most intimate friends. "You know--how--I worry," was the prefix they had l...

Like others who belonged to it, Grace was wont to excuse herself for attending the weekly luncheons of the Three Cheers Club on the ground that it was good business. One made co...

Anita's office, a free employment bureau, closed early, so that she was always the first to return to the apartment which she and Grace now shared. It stood on the same street a...

At two o'clock next morning Anita was riding home alone from Two Hundred and Twentieth Street. Dark houses, like regimented soldiers, stood up straight, then fell before the ons...

That winter Diana Reece left her husband. She had adopted Letty as bosom friend and often came to Letty's house, smothered in mink, her dark, hot eyes flashing in little torrent...

Grace nearly always went "out" in the evenings. All the girls whom she admitted to equality and who admitted her to equality went "out." It was the basis on which attractiveness...

One Sunday of the following March Grace set out to walk from her house to Letty's. She had been waiting now for three months since the event which even Grace had never fully dar...

Though it had not been discussed between Blake and Grace, it was taken for granted that the difference in their status would be only one of convenience. There was even a certain...

They were to continue to see a great deal of each other, as Grace was not the sort of old-fashioned spouse who is swallowed up by her husband's life. And at first she did manage...

On the way out, Grace and Anita sat in the back seat, Jerry in front with Blake. Grace said that Letty had been asking about her and that soon they must "all get together." Only...

A real-estate agent called for Blake soon after the lunch-breakfast to show him some land. Grace, plumped on the couch, was a spot of orange severely vivid in the midst of the S...