What with heat, the rage for buying, impatience to get in and impatience to get out, the fragrance of pine and holly decorations, the smell of hot varnish and hot people and cheap furs, the babble of excited voices and shrieks of exhausted children, it was the true Christmas spirit.  Peter Rolls’s store in general, and the toy department in particular, were having what would be alluded to later in advertisements as an “unprecedented success.”

Before Win came the folding chairs for “assistants” had all been broken or out of order.  But (no doubt, said Sadie) because of some lingering suspicion that she might, after all, be an anti-sweat spy, the springs or hinges were mysteriously repaired throughout the department.  By law any girl could sit down.  By unwritten law she mustn’t, yet there were the chairs as good as gold and fresh as paint.  They were even pointed out to Win, but in the whirl of things the moment after she forgot their very existence and never had time to remember it again.

That third day in Toys was the most appalling she had known of all the long, wild days at Peter Rolls’s since coming in as an extra holiday hand.  Dozens of customers clamoured for her at once.  Each female creature seemed to have as many hands as Briareus, all reaching for things they wanted, or gesticulating and brandishing money, or snatching for change.  If each distracted girl had had half a dozen highly trained astral bodies with which to serve these terrible ladies, it would not have been enough.  More ladies would have come.

Yet (Win noticed with wondering admiration) some of the girls, those most experienced and less easily rattled, did find opportunities to polish their nails and pat their hair.  They would turn as if to find something “in stock,” stoop quickly, taking advantage of the crowd behind the counters, snatch out of their stockings tiny mirrors and bags of powder or rouge, and “fix themselves,” while their anxious customers supposed they were diving for a toy.  These were the girls who kept their own perfumed soap and scent bottles in their lockers and could afford becoming hats, whether or no they had money to buy new underclothes and stockings when the old ones gave out.

Win, however, had neither experience enough nor desire to find time for personal matters.  She gave her whole soul to her work and wore that pleasant Christmas smile which floorwalkers wish to see on salesladies’ faces.  But her smile was only skin deep.  She had never liked her sister women less—­cross, silly, snapping, inconsiderate things, strutting and pushing about in skins and plumes of animals far more agreeable and beautiful than themselves!  Dangling all over with poor little heads of dead creatures, just as if they were moving butcher shops, and apparently without a sense of humour to tell them what idiots they looked.