One evening she learned from Belle that the increased trade incident to the approaching holiday season had rendered more help necessary, and that one large shop on Sixth Avenue had already made known this need.  When the doors opened the following morning, Mildred was among the crowd of applicants, and her appearance was so much in her favor that she was engaged at once on a salary of six dollars a week.  Only immediate necessity could have induced her to take this step, for she justly doubted her ability to endure the strain of standing continuously.  The shop, however, was full of girls as frail-looking as herself, and it was the only certainty of support within her reach.  Her mother cried bitterly over the step, and she, also, could not hide a few tears, brave as she tried to be; but she said resolutely, “I’m no better than hundreds of others, and if they can endure it I can and will, for a while at least.”

The first day was one that she never forgot.  The bright sun and clear, bracing atmosphere brought out crowds of shoppers, but the air of the store soon became vitiated, hot, and lifeless.  In this close, stifling place she was compelled to stand, elbowed by other girls who were strangers to her, and too busy or too indifferent to aid materially her inexperienced efforts to learn her duties.  She made blunders, for which she was scolded; she grew bewildered and faint, and when the few moments of nooning came she could not eat the lunch her mother had prepared.  If she could only have had a cup of strong coffee she might have got through the day; but her employers were much too thrifty to furnish such a luxury, and she was too tired, and the time allotted her much too brief to permit its quest.  Therefore she tried to rest a little from the intolerable fatigue and pain of standing, and to collect her thoughts.

The afternoon crush of customers was greater even than that which had crowded the counters in the morning, and she grew more and more bewildered under the confused fire of questions and orders.  If any one had had the time or heart to observe, there would have been seen in her eyes the pathetic, fearful look of some timid creature of the woods when harried and driven to bay by hounds.

Suddenly everything grew black before her eyes; the piled-up goods, the chattering throng, faded, and she sank to the floor—­there was no room for her to fall.

When she revived she found that she had been carried to the cloak-room, in which the girls ate their lunch, and that a woman was kneeling beside her applying restoratives.  In a few moments one of the managers looked in and asked, in an off-hand way, “How is she getting on?”

With the instinct of self-preservation Mildred sat up, and pleaded, “Indeed, sir, I’m better.  It was all so strange—­the air was close.  I beg of you not to discharge me.  I will learn soon.”

“Oh, don’t be so worried,” the man replied good-naturedly.  “It’s nothing new to have a girl faint on the first day.  You’ll get used to it by and by like the rest.  Will you be well enough to walk home, or shall I have a carriage ordered?”