With an unwrapped parcel rolled under one arm, she battled her way back to the staircase she had descended (not daring to squeeze her unworthy body into a crowded elevator), and toiled up to the eighth floor.  There, she had been told, were dressing-rooms as well as lockers; a rest room (converted into a schoolroom from the hour of eight until ten), and the restaurant for women employees.

Lightning change act first!  Black Effect to take the place of brown, a rush for the dressing-room, vague impression of near marble basins and rows of mirrors; tall, slim girl in front of one, quite the proper “saleslady” air, in new, six-dollar black skirt and silk blouse lightened with sewed-in frills of white, fit not noticeably bad; dash along corridor again for locker room, but sudden wavering pause at sight of confused group:  half-fainting girl in black being handed over to capped and aproned nurse by two youths at an open door, glimpse of iron bedsteads etched in black against varnished white wall, door shut with slap; youths marching light heartedly away, keeping time to the subdued whistle of “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee.”

Girls sometimes faint here, then, before ten o’clock in the morning!  And quite a matter of course to shed them in the hospital room, otherwise one wouldn’t try one’s tango steps going away.  But never mind; laugh first, or the world will!  Life easier for Peter Rolls’s hands as well as other people if they can live it in ragtime.  Your turn to fall to-day.  Mine to-morrow.  “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee!” And whatever you may think, don’t lose a minute.

Winifred did not.  Perhaps she, too, was beginning to think in ragtime.  She was telling her number to the doorkeeper of the locker room as the slap of the hospital door ceased to vibrate through the long corridor on the eighth story.

The locker room had countless rows of narrow cells with iron gratings for doors; and the gimlet gaze of two stalwart young females pierced each newcomer.  It was their business to see that Peter Rolls’s hands did not pilfer each other’s belongings.  The gimlet eyes must note the outdoor clothing each girl wore on arrival, in order to be sure that she did not go forth at evening clad in the property of a comrade.  Being paid to cultivate suspicion had soured the guardian angels’ tempers.  One had a novel by Laura Jean Libbey, the other an old-fashioned tale by Mary J. Holmes, to while away odd minutes of leisure; but it appealed to the imagination of neither that any or all of the girls flitting in and out might be eligible heroines for their favourite authors, stolen at birth from parent millionaires, qualifying through pathetic struggles with poverty to become the brides of other millionaires, or, perhaps, to win an earl or duke.