Whatever Amory might think about it, the other girls too thought Dorothy lucky to have had a real art-training. They had not been to the McGrath.... And, quite apart from the _cachet_ this gave her, Dorothy herself certainly had a way with her. Miss Smedley, for example, was as old as Dorothy, but Miss Smedley, for no reason that could be described, always seemed to move in an atmosphere of kindlily-bestowed pity; but nobody would have dreamed of pitying Dorothy. It was very much the other way. As if they had known her methods with sleeping-partners (which they did not), they looked up to her. Her sayings were repeated, her mistakes covered up for her; and even Miss Porchester never gave her "one for herself." She was the only one of the girls so exempted. One morning at about the time Miss Geraldine Towers became engaged to Mr. Massey, the fashion-studio was able at last to draw a long breath of relief and to tell itself that the worst of the half-yearly rush was about over. The last page of the last Summer Catalogue had been sent off to Endell Street, and for a month or two only the normal trickle of odd jobs would be coming in. Even the rule about not moving your head as you talked had been relaxed, and only one cloud marred the general sense of release--the certainty that some of the girls would be "given a holiday" until the next rush began in the Autumn. The girls were discussing this that afternoon. Miss Porchester had gone to Endell Street; fat Miss Benson, her second in command, had passed through the adjoining sitting-room half an hour before, and was guessed to be talking on the stairs with Mr. Mooney, of Hallowell's Handkerchief Department; and Dorothy also intended to take the risk of Miss Porchester's inquiring for her and to fly off presently to Cheyne Walk. "Oh, _you_ needn't worry, Smithie," said Miss Umpleby, her chair tilted back so that her primrose hair and clasped hands rested against the coats and jackets on the wall. "They always want somebody to run about and be useful. Hilda and I'll be the ladies till August. We shall come back again with the Furs." Hilda Jeyes had her elbows on the table; she was munching an apple. "It all comes of our being kept at the one thing, over and over again," she declared. "Look at me: what am I? A Camisole Specialist! Why, if I was to be set to do Damask, or Mourning, or Boots, like Benny, I should no more know where to begin than I could fly! If only that girl on the _Daily Spec_ would die! I'd be after her place in two twos, I promise you!" "They never die when they're on newspapers," Miss Umpleby remarked, with the detached air of one who reminds her hearers of a well-known fact in mortality statistics. "Splendid thing for the health. I wonder the doctors don't prescribe it." "And when they get married they stick to their jobs just the same," another girl commented. (To be on the staff of a newspaper, it may be said, is the prize of the fashion-artist's profession.)