position at Madam's, and a new sense of what money could actually do in
the way of procuring food and clothes and ordinary or extraordinary
physical comforts, Sally had returned to her old faith. She began to
have a little money to buy things for herself. Once or twice Miss
Summers gave her quite good-sized pieces of material, and there were
always scraps to be gathered and utilized. And Sally was enabled to
dress carefully. She became the smartest of the girls in the room, for
she had a natural sense of smartness. The other girls did not like her,
but they all envied her and admired her. It was not that she was
unpopular; but that they felt in her the hard determination to get on,
and were resentful of her manifest ability to achieve what she meant to
do.

The other girls were all sorted out in Sally's mind. There was not one
of them into whose nature she had not some biting insight. She had
become so practised that she knew all their dresses (as of course all
the others did, so that a new one was an event), and knew what
everything they owned had cost. She could recognise anything that had
been dyed, any brooch or adornment, any stockings. She would have made a
good house-detective. But she never told tales. If she knew, she knew,
and that was all. It was not for Sally to play the policeman. All
knowledge went into her memory. It would be devastatingly produced on
the occasion of a row, but Sally rarely quarrelled. With her, nothing
ever came to a quarrel. There was no need for it to do so. She was
neither jealous nor censorious. One does not quarrel with one who
neither loves nor blames nor is stupid or too anxious to show
cleverness. Sally merely "was," and the other girls knew it. For this
reason she was not liked, but neither was she feared or unpopular. They
did not hide things from her, but they did not show them eagerly. Sally
was Sally. She enjoyed being Sally. She meant always to be Sally.

And at last there came into Sally's life, when she had been at Madame
Gala's for about six months, a new interest, and a singular one. One
day, when they were all working very hard, and the electric light was
on, Madame came into the workroom with another person. And this person
was a young man with a grey, thin face, rather tall and stooping, with a
hesitating manner, and a general air of weakness. He followed Madame
Gala round the room in an idle way, nodding to several of the girls; and
Sally thought he had a very at