At first she was a little subdued and awed by the Bank, and by her own position in it.  But when this feeling wore off, the plump girl rolled into her place with a delicious abandonment.  Flossie was one of fifty girls who sat, row after row, at long flat desks covered with green cloth.  A soft monotonous light was reflected from the cream-coloured walls against which Flossie’s head stood out with striking effect, like some modern study in black and morbid white.  You would have picked her out among the fifty at once.  Hers was the lightest of light labour, the delicate handling of thousands of cancelled notes—­airy, insubstantial things, as it were the ghosts of bank-notes, released from the gross conditions of the currency.  Towards the middle of the morning Flossie would be immersed in a pale agitated sea of bank-notes.  The air would be full of light sounds, always the sharp brisk rustling of the notes, and now and then a human undertone, or towards lunch time, a breath that was like a sigh.  A place to grow light-headed in if you began to think about it.  Happily no thought was required beyond the intelligence that lives in sensitive finger-tips.  It was almost mechanical labour, and for that Flossie had more than a taste, she had a positive genius.  It was mechanical labour idealized and reduced to a fine art, an art in which the personality of the artist counted.  The work displayed to perfection the prettiness of Flossie’s hands, from the rapid play of her fingers in sifting, and their little fluttering, hovering movements in arranging, to the exquisitely soft touches of the palms when she gathered all her sheaves of notes into one sheaf, shaking, caressing, coaxing the rough edges into line.  Flossie worked with the rhythm and precision of a machine; and yet humanly, self-consciously, almost coquettishly, as under the master’s eye.

But all this was of yesterday.  To-day Flossie was different.  She was not quite so precise, so punctual as she had been.  Something had gone wrong with the bright little mechanism.  It worked erratically, now under protest, and now with spurts of terrifying activity.  The fine fly-wheels of thought had set off whirring on their own account and had got mixed up with the rest of the machinery.  Flossie had begun to philosophise, to annoy destiny with questions.  There was time for that in the afternoon when the worst of the sorting was done.  She was in the stage of doubt so attractive in philosophers and women, asking herself:  Is knowledge possible?  And if so, what do I know?  She was aware that there are certain insurpassable limits to human knowledge; all the same, woman-like, she raised herself on tip-toe, and tried to peep over the boundaries.  What did she know?  She knew that somebody pitied her, because, poor little woman, she had to earn her own living like a man.  Well, she would not have to do that if he—­if he—­Yes, and if he didn’t?  And how was she to know?  And yet, and yet she had an idea.  Anybody may have an idea.  Then the long desks became the green tables where Flossie gambled with fate; trying—­trying—­trying to force the invisible hand.