ng so soft and round as Flossie.

If Flossie's figure was small and round, her face was somewhat large,
a perfect oval moulded in the subtlest curves, smooth and white
moreover, with a tinge of ivory sallow towards the roots of her black
hair. Wonderful hair was Flossie's. In those days she parted it in the
middle and waved it symmetrically on either side of her low forehead;
she brought it over her ears, covering all but the tips and the
delicate pink lobes; she coiled it at the back in an elaborate spiral
and twisted it into innumerable little curls about the nape of her
neck. Unfortunately that neck was rather short; but she wore low
collars which made the most of it. And then Flossie's features were so
very correct. She had a correct little nose, neither straight nor
aquiline, but a distracting mixture of both, and a correct little
mouth, so correct and so small that you wondered how it managed to
display so many white teeth in one diminutive smile. Flossie's eyes
were not as her mouth; they were large, full-lidded, long-lashed, and
blacker than her hair. No wonder if the poor clerk who passed her on
her way to and fro in the City rejoiced as they looked up at him. She
might be going to her work as he to his, but what with her bright eyes
and her blue ribbons, she looked the very genius of holiday as she
went.

At first she was a little subdued and awed by the Bank, and by her own
position in it. But when this feeling wore off, the plump girl rolled
into her place with a delicious abandonment. Flossie was one of fifty
girls who sat, row after row, at long flat desks covered with green
cloth. A soft monotonous light was reflected from the cream-coloured
walls against which Flossie's head stood out with striking effect,
like some modern study in black and morbid white. You would have
picked her out among the fifty at once. Hers was the lightest of light
labour, the delicate handling of thousands of cancelled notes--airy,
insubstantial things, as it were the ghosts of bank-notes, released
from the gross conditions of the currency. Towards the middle of the
morning Flossie would be immersed in a pale agitated sea of
bank-notes. The air would be full of light sounds, always the sharp
brisk rustling of the notes, and now and then a human undertone, or
towards lunch time, a breath that was like a sigh. A place to grow
light-headed in if you began to think about it. Happily no thought was
required beyond the intelligence