I haven't kept you waiting," she said.

"Oh no, we don't close until ten," answered the saleswoman. She was
seated quietly sewing under the lamp.

"I wonder whether you'd mind if I put on my old suit again, and carried
this?" Janet asked.

The expression of sympathy and understanding in the woman's eyes, as
she rose, brought the blood swiftly to Janet's face. She felt that
her secret had been guessed. The change effected, Janet went homeward
swiftly, to encounter, on the corner of Faber Street, her sister Lise,
whose attention was immediately attracted by the bundle.

"What have you got there, angel face?" she demanded.

"A new suit," said Janet.

"You don't tell me--where'd you get it? at the Paris?"

"No, at Dowling's."

"Say, I'll bet it was that plain blue thing marked down to twenty!"

"Well, what if it was?"

Lise, when surprised or scornful, had a peculiarly irritating way of
whistling through her teeth.

"Twenty bucks! Gee, you'll be getting your clothes in Boston next. Well,
as sure as I live when I went by that window the other day when they
first knocked it down I said to Sadie, 'those are the rags Janet would
buy if she had the ready.' Have you got another raise out of Ditmar?"

"If I have, it isn't any business of yours," Janet retorted. "I've got a
right to do as I please with my own money."

"Oh sure," said Lise, and added darkly: "I guess Ditmar likes to see you
look well."

After this Janet refused obstinately to speak to Lise, to answer, when
they reached home, her pleadings and complaints to their mother that
Janet had bought a new suit and refused to exhibit it. And finally, when
they had got to bed, Janet lay long awake in passionate revolt against
this new expression of the sordidness and lack of privacy in which
she was forced to live, made the more intolerable by the close, sultry
darkness of the room and the snoring of Lise.

In the morning, however, after a groping period of semiconsciousness
during the ringing of the bells, the siren startled her into awareness
and alertness. It had not wholly lost its note of terror, but the note
had somehow become exhilarating, an invitation to adventure and to life;
and Lise's sarcastic comments as to the probable reasons why she did
not put on the new suit had host their power of exasperation. Janet
compromised, wearing a blouse of china silk hitherto reserved for
"best." The day was bright, and she went rapidly toward the mill,
gloryin