a time in front of a counter which took the place
of a window ledge. Now and then a girl or a man was kept for several
moments talking to a person whom Win could not yet see; a kind of god
in the machine. This halt delayed the procession and meant that a hand
was being engaged; but oftener than not the pause was short, and the
look on the late applicant's face as he or she turned to scurry back
like a chased dog along the corridor told its own story.

Win read each human document, as a page opened and then shut forever
under her eyes, with a sick, cold pang for the tragedy of the
unwanted. She ceased to feel that she was alien to these young men and
women, because they were American and she English. A curious
impression thrilled through her that she and these others and all
dwellers on earth were but so many beads threaded on the same
glittering string, that string the essence of the Creator, uniting all
if they but knew it.

The realization that hearts near hers were beating with hope or dread,
or sinking with disappointment, was so keen that the heavy air of the
place became charged for Win with the electricity of emotion. She felt
what all felt in a strange confusion; and when a stricken face went
by, it was she, Winifred Child, who was stricken. What happened to
others suddenly mattered just as much and in exactly the same degree
as what might happen to her. The weight of sadness and weariness
pressed upon her. The smell of unaired clothes and stale, cheap
perfumes made her head ache.

"Tired, girlie?" inquired the big young man on whose broad back Win
had involuntarily reposed on the way upstairs She was startled at this
manner of address, but the brotherly benevolence on the square face
under a thick brushwood of blond hair reassured her. Evidently
"girlie" was the right word in the right place.

"Not so very. Are you?" She felt that conversation would be a relief.
It was intensely cold yet stuffy in the corridor, and time seemed
endless.

"Me? Huh! Bet yer my place yer can't guess what my job was up to a
month ago."

He turned a strongly cut profile far over his shoulder, his head
pivoting on a great column of throat above a low, loose collar that
had a celluloid gleam where the light touched it. Only one eye and the
transparent gleam of another cornea were given to Winifred's view, but
that one green-gray orb was as compelling as a dozen ordinary seeing
apparatuses.

"If I guessed what's in my mind, I'