"No ladies with one foot on a chair for the _Daily Spec_, like the one you began this morning," Miss Umpleby remarked. "Well, what chance have we here, I should like to know, with one roughing out all the time, and another doing nothing but heads, and another the curly-cues! There isn't one of us except Benny who could do a job right through!" Hilda Jeyes grumbled. "Just so that we can turn the stuff out quicker!" somebody else joined in. "'Holiday's' a good name for it, I _don't_ think!" Miss Umpleby turned her eyes nonchalantly to the coats above her head. "Monte Carlo for me, I think," she said. "Then I shall be able to put in those petticoat bodices with Casino backgrounds and do somebody else out of a job." Hilda Jeyes threw away the core of her apple. "You needn't growl, anyway, Umpy. You are engaged." "So I am," remarked Miss Umpleby, as if she had just remembered it. "I think I'll ring my source of trouble up now." She brought the chair down on to its fore-legs again. "Tell me if Benny comes. You can all listen if you like.--Hallo, Exchange!--One-six-double-one Hop!" And at the telephone on Miss Porchester's table she began a conversation in which the words "Carlton ... or the Savoy if you like ... Mentone ... I've a little time on my hands now," recurred from time to time. Dorothy herself had more than once thought that this sub-division of work was hard on the girls. Umpy lived with her mother near dotting Hill Gate Station, and was engaged to a boy who got thirty shillings a week as a clerk in the Russian Import trade; Benny and Hilda Jeyes shared cheap rooms somewhere in Bloomsbury; the others lunched on buns or brought bread-and-butter or sandwiches in paper, and would have had to spend an hour in looking for a dropped shilling had they been so fortunate as to possess a shilling to drop. All were at the mercy of the half-yearly rush and the intervals of idleness between. Dorothy had sometimes wondered whether she herself ought not to have sponged on her relations rather than keep one of these needy girls out of a place.... But she was a practical young woman, with more plans than theories, and eyes that did not carry over many of the dreams of the night into the working days; and beyond a certain point she refused to shoulder the responsibilities of a world she had had no hand in making. Up to that point--well, if (say, by and by) she were ever to "run" a studio of this kind, she would see that the work was not so sub-divided that her girls had no chance in the open market. And she would offer now and then a little inducement over and above wages, and would arrange for them to get quite good but shop-soiled things at a fair reduction, and would get them to take an interest in their work, and would stop Hilda sucking her brushes, and would have the brick taken out of that ventilation-pipe, and another set of wash-bowls, and would annex that adjoining room, and--and--well, anyway, if Catalogues had to be done