door
almost on the back of an enormous young man, while a girl closed in
behind her with the intimacy of a sardine.

"Gee! Get on to the tall Effect in brown!" murmured a voice.

"Ain't she the baby doll?" another voice wanted to know.

Winifred heard, and realized that she was the Effect and baby doll in
question. She flushed, and her ears tingled. She thought of the
Arabian Nights tale, where the searcher after the Golden Water was
pestered by voices of those who had been turned to black stones on the
way.

When the cue of tightly packed men and women had advanced along a
corridor on the other side of the doorway, it began mounting a
fireproof staircase. Up and up it went, slowly, steadily rising from
story to story, but it did not spread across the whole width of the
wide, shallow steps. Other men and women, in single file and with no
attention to order, pushed themselves down, the ascending gang
flattening them against the varnished, green wall as they sneaked
hastily past. No one spoke to Win or told her anything (though the big
fellow in front threw her a jovial glance when she trod on his heel,
and she herself ventured a look at the rear sardine), but she knew
somehow that the irregular, descending procession was the defeated
army in flight; those who "would not do." She wondered if she should
be among them after a few hours of vain waiting and standing on her
feet.

Seven flights of stairs she counted, and then she and those in front
and behind debouched into a corridor much longer than that at the
entrance on the ground floor.

"They might have shot us up in the customers' lifts!" snapped the
sardine who had just detached herself from Winifred's spine. "'Twould
have saved their time and our tempers."

"They don't spend money putting up fireproof staircases for nothing,"
mumbled a voice over the sardine's shoulder. "They want to give us a
free exhibition of an emergency exit. But it'll be the only thing we
ever will get free here."

"Except maybe the sack--or the bounce," tittered the sardine.

There was something likable about that sardine. Win felt drawn to her,
which was fortunate in the circumstances.

Nearer and nearer they approached, with a kind of shuffle step, to an
office whose whole front consisted of window. This window was raised,
and electric light streaming out brightened that distant end of the
otherwise economically lit corridor. The advance guard of would-be
hands stepped one at