ce felt rather degraded, as well as
embarrassed, when she went into the large shop her father had named, and
asked for the cheap tobacco he used in his pipe. She fell back upon an
air of amused indulgence, hoping thus to suggest that her purchase
was made for some faithful old retainer, now infirm; and although the
calmness of the clerk who served her called for no such elaboration of
her sketch, she ornamented it with a little laugh and with the remark,
as she dropped the package into her coat-pocket, "I'm sure it'll please
him; they tell me it's the kind he likes."

Still playing Lady Bountiful, smiling to herself in anticipation of the
joy she was bringing to the simple old negro or Irish follower of the
family, she left the shop; but as she came out upon the crowded pavement
her smile vanished quickly.

Next to the door of the tobacco-shop, there was the open entrance to a
stairway, and, above this rather bleak and dark aperture, a sign-board
displayed in begrimed gilt letters the information that Frincke's
Business College occupied the upper floors of the building. Furthermore,
Frincke here publicly offered "personal instruction and training in
practical mathematics, bookkeeping, and all branches of the business
life, including stenography, typewriting, etc."

Alice halted for a moment, frowning at this signboard as though it were
something surprising and distasteful which she had never seen before.
Yet it was conspicuous in a busy quarter; she almost always passed it
when she came down-town, and never without noticing it. Nor was this the
first time she had paused to lift toward it that same glance of vague
misgiving.

The building was not what the changeful city defined as a modern one,
and the dusty wooden stairway, as seen from the pavement, disappeared
upward into a smoky darkness. So would the footsteps of a girl ascending
there lead to a hideous obscurity, Alice thought; an obscurity as dreary
and as permanent as death. And like dry leaves falling about her she saw
her wintry imaginings in the May air: pretty girls turning into
withered creatures as they worked at typing-machines; old maids "taking
dictation" from men with double chins; Alice saw old maids of a dozen
different kinds "taking dictation." Her mind's eye was crowded with
them, as it always was when she passed that stairway entrance; and
though they were all different from one another, all of them looked a
little like herself.

She hated th