"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"