“Oh, if you think this is hard!” echoed the plump girl, Miss Jones.  (Win noticed that the saleswomen called each other by name, though officially they were numbers.) “You ain’t bin three hours yet.  Wait and see how you feel to-night when ten o’clock comes.”

“Ten o’clock!” gasped Win.  “I thought we closed at six.”

“We’re supposed to shut up then, but folks won’t go these busy weeks.  They can’t be chased out.  And we have to stay hours after they have gone, putting away stock and—­oh, shucks of things.  Little do the swell dames care what happens to us once they’re outside the doors.  I guess they think we cease to exist the minute they don’t need us to wait on them.”

“I’ve always heard that rich American women took such an interest in the working—­I mean, in us, who work,” Win hastily amended.

“Oh, when they’re old or sick of their diamonds and their automobiles they think it’ll be some spree to come and stir us guyls up to strike against our wrongs.  But when we’ve struck it’s just about their time for getting sick of us.  I got caught that way once when I worked in a candy-box factory.  I bet I don’t again!  See here, I’m kind of sorry for you if you thought the Hands was a party where they asked you to sit down and have afternoon tea.  Fred Thorpe, the floorwalker in this depart, is a real good feller, and he’d be glad to give us a rest—­a big difference between him and some I’ve knowed!  But he dasn’t treat us as white as he’d like.  In this show every Jack and Jill is watched from above.  There ain’t nobody except Father himself das’ call his soul his own.  If a chap thinks he’s safe to do some tiny thing his own way, gee! a brick falls smack on his head.  That’s one of Peter Rolls’s little ways.”

Win shivered slightly to hear that name thus used, but Miss Jones was absorbed in her subject.

“Us guyls ain’t even supposed to talk to each other, except about business,” she went on.  “But that’s just the one thing they can’t stop, and they know they can’t, so they have to wink at it.  You see, though, the way I keep folding the goods or pretending to look for something every instant, so you’d most think I’d got the St. Vitus’s dance?  Well, that’s because if we just stood with our heads together poor Thorpe would have to come careering over here and inquire what was the subject of our earnest conversation.  He’d hate it like poison, but he’d do it all the same, or the feller above would know the reason why.”

“I thought he seemed kind and nice—­I mean Mr. Thorpe,” said Win.

“No use trying to mash him!  He’s gone on Dora Stein.  Say, did you get on to the sale job?  I somehow thought you did.”

“I saw there was some trouble,” Win hesitated.

“Trouble?  There’s nothing but trouble.  Anybody’d think we was asking for it!  This blessed depart is upset from way back since the promotions began.  Our last superintendent got the sack through his drunken wife coming around the place makin’ scenes.  And Mr. Meggison was put over another man’s head.  That made t’other feller so mad he blowed out his brains.  ’Twas in the papers, but it got hushed up mighty quick.  The news, not the brains, I mean!  Old Saint Peter knows some tricks of hushin’ up.