The ‘tube’ lift was crowded, and Elsie Marion, with an apprehensive glance at the clock, rapidly weighed in her mind whether it would be best to wait for the next lift and risk the censure of Mr Tack or whether she should squeeze in before the great sliding doors clanged together. She hated lifts, and most of all she hated crowded lifts. Whilst she hesitated the doors rolled together with a ‘Next lift, please!’
She stared at the door blankly, annoyed at her own folly. This was the morning of all mornings when she wished to be punctual.
Tack had been mildly grieved by her innumerable failings, and had nagged her persistently for the greater part of the week. She was unpunctual, she was untidy, she was slack to a criminal extent for a lady cashier whose efficiency is reckoned by the qualities which, as Tack insisted, she did not possess.
The night before, he had assembled the cash girls and had solemnly warned them that he wished to see them in their places at nine o’clock sharp. Not, he was at trouble to explain, at nine-ten, or at nine-five, not even at nine-one – but as the clock in the tower above Tack and Brighten’s magnificent establishment chimed the preliminary quarters before booming out the precise information that nine o’clock had indeed arrived, he wished every lady to be in her place.
There had been stirring times at Tack and Brighten’s during the past three months. An unaccountable spirit of generosity had been evinced by the proprietors – but it had been exercised towards the public rather than in favour of the unfortunate employees. The most extraordinary reductions in the sale price of their goods and the most cheeseparing curtailments of selling cost had resulted – so traitorous members of the counting-house staff said secretly – in a vastly increased turnover and, in some mysterious fashion, in vastly increased profits.
Some hinted that those profits were entirely fictitious, but that was slander only to be hinted at, for why should Tack and Brighten, a private company with no shareholders to please or pain, go out of their way to fake margins? For the moment, the stability of the firm was a minor consideration.
It wanted seven minutes to nine, and here was Elsie Marion at Westminster Bridge Road Tube Station, and Tack and Brighten’s Oxford Street premises exactly twelve minutes away. She shrugged her pretty shoulders. One might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, she thought. But she was angry with herself at her own stupidity. The next lift would be as crowded – she was left in no doubt as to that, for it was full as soon as the doors were open – and she might have saved three precious minutes.
She was crowded to the side of the lift and was thankful that the unsavoury and often uncleanly patrons of the line at this hour in the morning were separated from her by a tall man who stood immediately before her.
He was bareheaded, and his grey hair was neatly brushed and pomaded. His high forehead, clean-cut aquiline nose and firm chin, gave him an air of refinement and suggested breed. His eyes were blue and deep-set, his lips a trifle thin, and his cheekbones, without being prominent, were noticeable on his suntanned face. All this she took in in one idle glance. She wondered who he was, and fo
