“On the streets, then.”

Mavis’s body glowed with the hot blood of righteous anger.

“It can’t be,” she urged.

“Can’t be?”

“It isn’t right.”

“What’s that to do with it?”

“It wouldn’t be allowed.”

“Who’s to stop it?”

“But if it’s wrong, it simply can’t go on.”

“Whose to stop it, I say?”

It was on the tip of Mavis’s tongue to urge how He might interfere to prevent His sparrows being devoured by hawks; but this was not a subject which she cared to discuss with Miss Allen.  This young person, taking Mavis’s silence for the acquiescence of defeat, went on: 

“Of course, on the stage or in books something always happens just in the nick of time to put things right; but that ain’t life, or nothing like it.”

“What is life, then?” asked Mavis, curious to hear what the other would say.

“Money:  earning enough to live on and for a bit of a fling now and then.”

“What about love?”

“That’s a luxury.  If the stage and books was what life really is, we shop-girls wouldn’t like ’em so much.”

Mavis relapsed into silence, at which Miss Allen said: 

“Of course, in my heart, dear, I think just as you do and would like to have no ‘truck’ with Ada Potter or Rose Impett; but one has to know which side one’s bread is buttered.  See?”

Later, when talking over Mavis with the girls she had disparaged, Miss Allen was equally emphatic in her condemnation of “that stuck-up ‘B.  C.,’” as she called the one-time teacher of Brandenburg College.

Mavis’s anger, once urged to boiling point by what she had learned of old Orgles’s practices, did not easily cool; it remained at a high temperature, and called into being all the feeling of revolt, of which she was capable, against the hideous injustice and the infamous wrongs to which girls were exposed who sought employment at “Dawes’,” or who, having got this, wished for promotion.  Luckily, or unluckily for her, the course of this story will tell which, the Marquis de Raffini, accompanied by a new “Madame the Marquise,” came into the shop directly she came up from dinner on the same day, and made for where she was standing.  Two or three of the “young ladies” pressed forward, but the Marquis was attracted by Mavis; he showed in an unmistakable manner that he preferred her services.

He wanted a trousseau for “Madame the Marquise.”  He—­ahem!—­she was very particular, very, very particular about her lingerie; would Mavis show “Madame” “Dawes’” most dainty and elaborate specimens?