“By this time next week I bet she smiles the wrong side of her mouth if she puts on any airs with Dora Stein.”

“Hum-m, yeh.  Unless what you think’s so, and she’s on the right side o’ Father.”

It was true, as the girls had warned the new hand, when six o’clock—­closing time—­came, you “couldn’t chase the dames out.”  The salespeople began to put things away, and some even ventured to remind customers that the shop shut at six; but ladies who believed themselves possessed of the kindest hearts on earth pleaded that they must have one more thing, only just one, to complete their list for that day.  Those who were too cross and tired to think about hearts or anything else except their own nerves, made no excuses at all, but demanded what they wanted or threatened a report to the floorwalker if a saleswoman were “disagreeable.”

“Look at them!” snapped Miss Stein, maddened by a consignment of more blouses from the bankrupt sale (which had brought upon Horrocks the gibes of the head buyer), blouses without sashes, which not even Poiret could have turned into “Pavlovas.”  “Look at them, the fat, old, self-satisfied lemons, with their hats and their dresses and their squeezed-in corsets and shoes, and even their back hair, bought in sweat shops like ours!  Pills, going to their homes to say their prayers, and then, full o’ dinner, to the meeting of the Anti-Sweats.  I know em!  Maybe they’ll do some o’ the sweatin’ in kingdom come!”

Already Win had learned that a “lemon” or a “pill” was a customer who made as much trouble as possible for as small as possible a return; but it gave her a stab to hear Peter Rolls’s great department store called a “sweat shop.”  Again she saw the eyes.  Was she never to get rid of the memory of those hypocritical blue eyes?

Nobody thought of being ready for home until nearly ten o’clock; and long before that Miss Stein’s nerves felt as if they had been run, like threads, through the eyes of hot needles.  Again Win had helped her in the afternoon by placing blouses of congenial colours together on the counters instead of letting them lie anyhow, as Miss Stein, in her recklessness, would have done.  But less than ever had the elder girl seen reason for thanking Miss Child when the second instalment of “punk” goods was brought out of “reserve.”

If the first lot had not gone off so soon they would not have been saddled with this, and so 2884 had, in Miss Stein’s estimation, done nothing at the end of the day except “show herself off” and make everybody work twice as hard as necessary.  She would not tell Win how to put things away, or let anybody else help her out.

“You gotta learn for yourself or you never will,” she said sharply, all the more sharply because Fred Thorpe, the floorwalker, happened to be within earshot.

“I don’t care what he thinks of me!” she said fiercely to herself, knowing that Thorpe would understand and disapprove her injustice to the new girl.  But it was only half true that she did not care.