Brice, and I can tell you he'll be very angry with you.'

'And who are _you_, my young friend?' said the policeman sceptically,
and threateningly.

'I'm--'

The formula proved useless. Lady Brice (_née_ Kentucky-Webster) was led
off in all her vast speechless, outraged impeccability, and poor little
Lily was glad to escape with her freedom and the memory of Lady Brice's
grateful bow.

She ran, gliding in and out between the knots of visitors, until she was
stopped by a pair of doors being suddenly shut and fastened in her face.
The reason for the obstruction was plain. Those doors admitted to the
blouse department, and the blouse department, as Lily could see through
the diamond panes, was a surging sea of bargain-hunters, amid which
shopwalkers stood up like light-houses, while the girls behind the
counters trembled in fear of being washed away. Discipline, order,
management, had ceased to exist at Hugo's.

Mrs. Shawn turned to seek another route, but already dozens of women
were upon her, and she could not retire. The crowd of candidates for
admission to the blouse department swelled till it filled the gallery
between that department and its neighbour. Then someone cried out for
air, and someone else protested that the doors at the other end of the
short gallery had also been shut. Lily, whose manifold misfortunes had
not quenched her interest in the 'Incroyable' corset, opened her parcel,
and found that the corset was not an 'Incroyable' at all, but an
inferior substitute, with no proper belted band, and of a shape to