When the cue of tightly packed men and women had advanced along a corridor on the other side of the doorway, it began mounting a fireproof staircase.  Up and up it went, slowly, steadily rising from story to story, but it did not spread across the whole width of the wide, shallow steps.  Other men and women, in single file and with no attention to order, pushed themselves down, the ascending gang flattening them against the varnished, green wall as they sneaked hastily past.  No one spoke to Win or told her anything (though the big fellow in front threw her a jovial glance when she trod on his heel, and she herself ventured a look at the rear sardine), but she knew somehow that the irregular, descending procession was the defeated army in flight; those who “would not do.”  She wondered if she should be among them after a few hours of vain waiting and standing on her feet.

Seven flights of stairs she counted, and then she and those in front and behind debouched into a corridor much longer than that at the entrance on the ground floor.

“They might have shot us up in the customers’ lifts!” snapped the sardine who had just detached herself from Winifred’s spine. “’Twould have saved their time and our tempers.”

“They don’t spend money putting up fireproof staircases for nothing,” mumbled a voice over the sardine’s shoulder.  “They want to give us a free exhibition of an emergency exit.  But it’ll be the only thing we ever will get free here.”

“Except maybe the sack—­or the bounce,” tittered the sardine.

There was something likable about that sardine.  Win felt drawn to her, which was fortunate in the circumstances.

Nearer and nearer they approached, with a kind of shuffle step, to an office whose whole front consisted of window.  This window was raised, and electric light streaming out brightened that distant end of the otherwise economically lit corridor.  The advance guard of would-be hands stepped one at a time in front of a counter which took the place of a window ledge.  Now and then a girl or a man was kept for several moments talking to a person whom Win could not yet see; a kind of god in the machine.  This halt delayed the procession and meant that a hand was being engaged; but oftener than not the pause was short, and the look on the late applicant’s face as he or she turned to scurry back like a chased dog along the corridor told its own story.

Win read each human document, as a page opened and then shut forever under her eyes, with a sick, cold pang for the tragedy of the unwanted.  She ceased to feel that she was alien to these young men and women, because they were American and she English.  A curious impression thrilled through her that she and these others and all dwellers on earth were but so many beads threaded on the same glittering string, that string the essence of the Creator, uniting all if they but knew it.