weeks before the completion of the new twelve-story addition the
store advertised for two hundred experienced saleswomen. Rachel
Wiletzky, entering the superintendent's office after a wait of three
hours, was Applicant No. 179. The superintendent did not look up as
Rachel came in. He scribbled busily on a pad of paper at his desk, thus
observing rules one and two in the proper conduct of superintendents
when interviewing applicants. Rachel Wiletzky, standing by his desk,
did not cough or wriggle or rustle her skirts or sag on one hip. A sense
of her quiet penetrated the superintendent's subconsciousness. He
glanced up hurriedly over his left shoulder. Then he laid down his
pencil and sat up slowly. His mind was working quickly enough though. In
the twelve seconds that intervened between the laying down of the pencil
and the sitting up in his chair he had hastily readjusted all his
well-founded preconceived ideas on the appearance of shop-girl
applicants.

Rachel Wiletzky had the colouring and physique of a dairymaid. It was
the sort of colouring that you associate in your mind with lush green
fields, and Jersey cows, and village maids, in Watteau frocks, balancing
brimming pails aloft in the protecting curve of one rounded upraised
arm, with perhaps a Maypole dance or so in the background. Altogether,
had the superintendent been given to figures of speech, he might have
said that Rachel was as much out of place among the preceding one
hundred and seventy-eight bloodless, hollow-chested, stoop-shouldered
applicants as a sunflower would be in a patch of dank white fungi.

He himself was one of those bleached men that you find on the office
floor of department stores. Grey skin, grey eyes, greying hair, careful
grey clothes--seemingly as void of pigment as one of those sunless
things you disclose when you turn over a board that has long lain on the
mouldy floor of a damp cellar. It was only when you looked closely that
you noticed a fleck of golden brown in the cold grey of each eye, and a
streak of warm brown forming an unquenchable forelock that the
conquering grey had not been able to vanquish. It may have been a
something within him corresponding to those outward bits of human
colouring that tempted him to yield to a queer impulse. He whipped from
his breast-pocket the grey-bordered handkerchief, reached up swiftly and
passed one white corner of it down the length of Rachel Wiletzky's
Killarney-rose left cheek. The ru