‘Next, please,’ said the cashier sharply, after a moment.

‘My change,’ demanded Lily.

‘You have had it, madam.’

‘Oh,’ said Lily, ’I have had it, have I?  Now, none of your nonsense, young man!  Do you know who I am?  I’m Mrs. Albert Shawn.’

‘Mr. Randall,’ the cashier called out coldly, and a grave and gigantic shopwalker appeared who knew not the name of Albert Shawn, and who firmly told Mrs. Shawn that if she wished to make a complaint she must make it at the Central Inquiry Office, ground-floor, Department 1A.

Lily had been brazenly robbed at Hugo’s by an employe of Hugo!  She was elbowed away by other women apparently anxious to be robbed.  She wanted to cry, but suddenly remembering her identity, and her pass to the presence of Hugo, she threw up her head and marched off through the crowds.

She had not proceeded twenty yards before she was stopped by a group of persons round a policeman—­a policeman obviously called in from Sloane Street.  A stout woman of lady-like appearance had been arrested on a charge of attempted pocket-picking.  An accusatory shopwalker charged her, and she replied warmly that she was Lady Brice (nee Kentucky-Webster), the American wife of the well-known philanthropist, and that her carriage was waiting outside.  The policeman and the shopwalker smiled.  It was so easy to be the wife of a well-known philanthropist, and in these days all the best pickpockets had their carriages waiting outside.

‘I know this lady by sight,’ said Lily.  ’She visited the common-rooms last year to see the arrangements, with Mr. Hugo, and he called her Lady Brice, and I can tell you he’ll be very angry with you.’

‘And who are you, my young friend?’ said the policeman sceptically, and threateningly.

‘I’m—­’

The formula proved useless.  Lady Brice (nee Kentucky-Webster) was led off in all her vast speechless, outraged impeccability, and poor little Lily was glad to escape with her freedom and the memory of Lady Brice’s grateful bow.

She ran, gliding in and out between the knots of visitors, until she was stopped by a pair of doors being suddenly shut and fastened in her face.  The reason for the obstruction was plain.  Those doors admitted to the blouse department, and the blouse department, as Lily could see through the diamond panes, was a surging sea of bargain-hunters, amid which shopwalkers stood up like light-houses, while the girls behind the counters trembled in fear of being washed away.  Discipline, order, management, had ceased to exist at Hugo’s.

Mrs. Shawn turned to seek another route, but already dozens of women were upon her, and she could not retire.  The crowd of candidates for admission to the blouse department swelled till it filled the gallery between that department and its neighbour.  Then someone cried out for air, and someone else protested that the doors at the other end of the short gallery had also been shut.  Lily, whose manifold misfortunes had not quenched her interest in the ‘Incroyable’ corset, opened her parcel, and found that the corset was not an ‘Incroyable’ at all, but an inferior substitute, with no proper belted band, and of a shape to startle even a Brighton bathing-woman!  The change must have been effected by the assistant in making up the parcel.