"I got another berth after--well, after experiences something like those which you have lately had; I was looking a nice sort of drab by the time I got it. It was in a shop which did a cutting trade, a low-class shop, an open-to-all-hours-of-the-night sort of shop, in a low-class neighbourhood in which people did not start buying till an hour when the shops ought to be closed. What a life I had there! You talk about what you've been doing, and you're a man."

Her thoughts seemed to be harking back, but she still smiled.

"I've seen columns of gush in the papers about the woes of shop assistants; if the British public only knew--if every woman had to serve a term as assistant in some of the shops I could tell them of, things would be altered pretty quick."

She leaned towards him over the table.

"You say you'd like to wring my neck; if you only knew the number of people there were in that shop to whom I would have given almost anything for the chance of wringing theirs--I almost did wring one woman's, who was, ironically, called a housekeeper, and who was an unspeakable thing! You talk of the swine with whom you've herded; you've never had to associate with the likes of her, and be under her thumb--and that's why I left."

Restlessness seemed all at once to seize her. She rose from her seat and stood in front of the fire.

"I did some more starving, and--that sort of thing, then I got another berth, no better than the other. They said my accounts were wrong--they couldn't prove it, and I don't believe they were, but they sent me packing that very day. You've no notion for how little, for nothing at all, a draper's assistant, who may have given months and years good service, is thrown into the ditch, no reason vouchsafed, no remedy obtainable, no character to be had."

She swept out her hands, as if she were brushing from her a flood of memories.

"Oh, I had all sorts of experiences; I was in the place you mentioned for years, although I'm not an old woman now; you see, I got there first when I was so very young; that does make a difference. Oh, I saw the drapery in all its phases; to this hour I can't enter a draper's shop without feeling a chill at the bottom of my spinal column; my skin goes all goose-fleshy; I think of what drapers' shops once meant to me. But there came a time when I had done with them--I'll take care that it's for ever; that was when I reached the very lowest circle in the pit. How many 

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