The big store was packed with shoppers. The air was clammy and stale; the counters were a mass of soiled and dingy merchandise. Tiny cash-girls ran wearily to and fro, elbowing a difficult way through the jam in the narrow aisles. Behind the counters pale-faced clerks eyed the customers savagely, and attended with languid insolence to their wants.
Eleanor sniffed the air daintily. “What an awful place, Madeline! Where do all these shoppers come from? I don’t feel a bit as if I were in Harding.”
“From Factory Hill, I suppose, and from across the tracks where the French settlement is. Let’s go to the toy department and buy Fluffy a doll. I’m sure they’ll have something unique to add to her collection.”
Eleanor stood near the door, hesitating. “It’s horribly smelly. You don’t think we shall catch anything, do you?”
Madeline laughed. “You’d never do to go really and truly slumming, Eleanor. No, we shan’t catch anything, probably. Come along. I thought you wanted to investigate this place.”
So Eleanor bravely “came along.” They bought a penny doll for Fluffy, from a sad-eyed little clerk who told them she was “tired most to death working nights,” and then, when a floor-walker appeared suddenly from around a corner, took it all back and declared loudly that business was fine this year and she liked the rush of “somethin’ doin’.”
On the way down-stairs—Eleanor had firmly refused to get into one of Cannon’s elevators—they came upon a girl crying bitterly.
“What’s the matter?” Madeline asked in the friendly, companionable way that always got her answers.
“I’ve been fined again,” the girl sobbed. “Ten cents ain’t so much, but neither is four dollars. That’s what I get. I’ve been fined three times this week. What for? Why, once for being late in the morning—it’s awful easy to sleep over when you’ve been working late at night—and once for sitting down on the ledge behind the counter. It’s against the rules to sit down, you know. And this time it was for talking back to an inspector who said my check was wrong. It wasn’t. If it had been, I’d have been fined for that.”
Eleanor had been hunting through her pocketbook.