The contaminated air of the passage leading to the eating-room brought on a feeling of nausea.  Miss Meakin, noticing Mavis change colour, remarked: 

“We’re all like that at first:  you’ll soon get used to it.”

If the atmosphere of the downstair regions discouraged appetite, the air in the glazed bricked dining-room was enough to take it away; it was heavy with the reek arising from cooked joints and vegetables.  Mavis took her place, when a plate heaped up with meat and vegetables was passed to her.  One look was enough:  the meat was cag mag, and scarcely warm at that; the potatoes looked uninvitingly soapy; the cabbage was coarse and stringy; all this mess was seemingly frozen in the white fat of what had once been gravy.  Mavis sickened and turned away her head; she noticed that the food affected many of the girls in a like manner.

“No wonder,” she thought, “that so many of them are pasty-faced and unwholesome-looking.”

She realised the necessity of providing the human machine with fuel; she made an effort to disguise the scant flavour of the best-looking bits she could pick out by eating plenty of bread.  She had swallowed one or two mouthfuls and already felt better for the nourishment, when her eye fell on a girl seated nearly opposite to her, whom she had not noticed before.  This creature was of an abnormal stoutness; her face was covered with pimples and the rims of her eyes were red; but it was not these physical defects which compelled Mavis’s attention.  The girl kept her lips open as she ate, displaying bloodless gums in which were stuck irregular decayed teeth; she exhibited the varying processes of mastication, the while her boiled eyes stared vacantly before her.  She compelled Mavis’s attention, with the result that the latter had no further use for the food on her plate.  She even refused rice pudding, which, although burned, might otherwise have attracted her.

The air of the shop upstairs was agreeably refreshing after the vitiated atmosphere of the dining-room; it saved her from faintness.  Happily, she was sent down to tea at a quarter to four, to find that this, by a lucky accident, was stronger and warmer than the tepid stuff with which she had been served at breakfast.  As the hours wore on, Mavis noticed that most of the girls seemed to put some heart into their work; she supposed that this elation was caused by the rapidly approaching hour of liberty.  When this at last arrived, there was a rush to the bedrooms.  Mavis, who was now suffering tortures from a racking headache, went listlessly upstairs; she wondered if she would be allowed to go straight to bed.  When she got into the room, she found everything in confusion.  Miss Potter, Miss Allen, and Miss Impett were frantically exchanging their working clothes for evening attire.  Mavis was surprised to see the three girls painting their cheeks and eyebrows in complete indifference to her presence.  They took small notice of her; they were too busy discussing the expensive eating-houses at which they were to dine and sup.  Miss Potter, in struggling into her evening bodice, tore it behind.  Mavis, seeing that Miss Allen was all behind with her dressing, offered to sew it.