“Mr. Spencer is a friend of yours. He'll never let you do it.”
“He is not to know, Clare,” Audrey said briskly. “You are quite right. He would probably be very—mannish about it. So we won't tell him. And now, how shall I go about getting in? Will they teach me, or shall I have to lust learn? And whatever shall I wear?”
Clare explained while, for she was determined not to lose a minute, Audrey changed into her plainest clothes. They would be in time, if they hurried, before the employment department closed. There were women in charge there. They card-indexed you, and then you were investigated by the secret service and if you were all right, well, that was all.
“Mercy! It's enough,” said Audrey, impatiently. “Do you mean to say they'll come here?”
She glanced around her rooms, littered with photographs of people well known to the public through the society journals, with its high bright silver vases, its odd gifts of porcelain, its grand piano taking up more than its share of room.
“If they come here,” she deliberated, “they won't take me, Clare. They'll be thinking I'm living on German money!”
So, in the end, she did not go to the munition works. She went room-hunting instead, with Clare beside her, very uncomfortable on the street for fear Audrey would be compromised by walking with her. And at six o'clock that evening a young woman with a softly inflected voice and an air of almost humorous enjoyment of something the landlady failed to grasp, was the tenant, for one month's rent in advance, of a room on South Perry Street.
Clare was almost in tears.
“I can't bear to think of your sleeping in that bed, Mrs. Valentine,” she protested. “It dips down so.”
“I shan't have much time to sleep, anyhow. And when I do so I shall be so tired!—-What was the name I gave her, Clare?”