dollars a month. Brooding over these things, Susan would let her
work accumulate, and endure, in heavy silence, the kindly, curious
speculations and comments of her associates.

But perhaps a hot lunch or a friendly word would send her spirits
suddenly up again, Susan would forget her vague ambitions, and
reflect cheerfully that it was already four o'clock, that she was
going with Cousin Mary Lou and Billy Oliver to the Orpheum to-night,
that her best white shirtwaist ought by this time to have come back
from the laundry.

Or somehow, if depression continued, she would shut her desk, in
mid-afternoon, and leave Front Office, cross the long deck--which
was a sort of sample room for rubber goods, and was lined with long
cases of them--descend a flight of stairs to the main floor, cross
it and remount the stairs on the other side of the building, and
enter the mail-order department. This was an immense room, where
fifty men and a few girls were busy at long desks, the air was
filled with the hum of typewriters and the murmur of low voices.
Beyond it was a door that gave upon more stairs, and at the top of
them a small bare room known as the lunch-room. Here was a great
locker, still marked with the labels that had shown where senna
leaves and tansy and hepatica had been kept in some earlier stage of
Hunter, Baxter & Hunter's existence, and now filled with the girls'
lunch-boxes, and rubber overshoes, and hair-brushes. There was a
small gas-stove in this room, and a long table with benches built
about it. A door gave upon a high strip of flat roof, and beyond a
pebbled stretch of tar were the dressings-rooms, where there were
wash-stands, and soap, and limp towels on rollers.