He was awaked at seven by the loud ringing of a bell, and by a quarter to eight they were all dressed and hurrying downstairs in their stockinged feet to pick out their boots.  They laced them as they ran along to the shop in Oxford Street for breakfast.  If they were a minute later than eight they got none, nor, once in, were they allowed out to get themselves anything to eat.  Sometimes, if they knew they could not get into the building in time, they stopped at the little shop near their quarters and bought a couple of buns; but this cost money, and most went without food till dinner.  Philip ate some bread and butter, drank a cup of tea, and at half past eight began his day’s work again.

“First to the right.  Second on the left, madam.”

Soon he began to answer the questions quite mechanically.  The work was monotonous and very tiring.  After a few days his feet hurt him so that he could hardly stand:  the thick soft carpets made them burn, and at night his socks were painful to remove.  It was a common complaint, and his fellow `floormen’ told him that socks and boots just rotted away from the continual sweating.  All the men in his room suffered in the same fashion, and they relieved the pain by sleeping with their feet outside the bed-clothes.  At first Philip could not walk at all and was obliged to spend a good many of his evenings in the sitting-room at Harrington Street with his feet in a pail of cold water.  His companion on these occasions was Bell, the lad in the haberdashery, who stayed in often to arrange the stamps he collected.  As he fastened them with little pieces of stamp-paper he whistled monotonously.

CIV

The social evenings took place on alternate Mondays.  There was one at the beginning of Philip’s second week at Lynn’s.  He arranged to go with one of the women in his department.

“Meet ’em ’alf-way,” she said, “same as I do.”

This was Mrs. Hodges, a little woman of five-and-forty, with badly dyed hair; she had a yellow face with a network of small red veins all over it, and yellow whites to her pale blue eyes.  She took a fancy to Philip and called him by his Christian name before he had been in the shop a week.

“We’ve both known what it is to come down,” she said.

She told Philip that her real name was not Hodges, but she always referred to “me ’usband Misterodges;” he was a barrister and he treated her simply shocking, so she left him as she preferred to be independent like; but she had known what it was to drive in her own carriage, dear—­she called everyone dear—­and they always had late dinner at home.  She used to pick her teeth with the pin of an enormous silver brooch.  It was in the form of a whip and a hunting-crop crossed, with two spurs in the middle.  Philip was ill at ease in his new surroundings, and the girls in the shop called him `sidey.’  One addressed him as Phil, and he did not answer because he had not the least idea that she was speaking to him; so she tossed her head, saying he was a `stuck-up thing,’ and next time with ironical emphasis called him Mister Carey.  She was a Miss Jewell, and she was going to marry a doctor.  The other girls had never seen him, but they said he must be a gentleman as he gave her such lovely presents.