ew things. No dress at all but the well-cut,
brand-new gown that I stood up in; one hat, one jacket, and two pairs of
expensive shoes, three changes of underclothes, and silk stockings. All
were good, but all so obviously just out of the shop! There was
absolutely nothing about them to link their owner to any past before she
came to the hotel!

For the fact is that when I sent my boxes and hold-all away I had also
repudiated every stitch of the very shabby clothing that had been mine
while I was not Miss Million's maid, but her mistress. The ne'er-do-well
serge skirts, the makeshift "Jap" silk blouses with no "cut" about them,
the underclothes, all darned and patched, the much-mended stockings,
once black cashmere but now faded to a kind of myrtle-green--all, all
had gone to swell two bulky parcels which I had put up and sent off to
The Little Sisters of the Poor!

I had heaved a sigh of delight as I had handed those parcels over the
post-office counter. It had been the fulfilment of the wish of years!

I expect every hard-up girl knows that impulse, that mad longing that
she could make a perfectly clean sweep of every single stitch she
possesses to wear! How rapturously she would send it all, all away! Oh,
her joy if she might make an entirely new start--with all fresh clothes;
good ones, pretty ones, becoming ones! Clothes that she would enjoy
wearing, even if there were only so very few of them!

In my case they were so few that I really did not feel that they could
support any sort of kit-inspection. Especially under the eyes of mere
male men, who never do understand anything that has to do with our
attire.

There I stood, in the only frock I had got, in the only other apron and
cap (all exquisite of their kind, mind you!), and I said falteringly: "I
am very sorry to be disobliging! But I cannot consent to let you search
my things, or open my boxes."

"Looks very bad, indeed, that's all I can say," broke out the stout
Hebrew gentleman excitedly. "Afraid we shall be obliged to do so,
officer, whether this young woman wants to let us or not."

"You can't," I protested. "Nobody can search a person's box against
their will!"

I remember hearing from Million, in the old days of heart-to-heart
confidences about her "other situations," that this was "The law of the
land."

No mistress had the right of opening the trunk of a reluctant maid on
her, the mistress's, own responsibility!

"We might find ourselves ob