"But go and talk to Big Annie. She's really a rather remarkable woman. At stated hours she sits on point duty on the landing of her floor of eighty bedrooms, just where everybody's got to pass her, and if you look like making--er--a mistake (and your hotel's quite an easy place to get lost in) she sets you right without a quiver of her face. Yes, she's rather an alarming person. There's a swiftness about her way of summing up people from a single glance at their faces. Oh, you don't take Annie in with a wedding-ring and a 'darling' or so--especially when the lady asks the darling whether he takes sugar in his early morning cup of tea.... "Yes, you go and see Annie." * * * * * Drub-drub--drub-drub-drub---- After a time that stupor of the ear became a stupor of the eye also. Even when a match glowed before a face for a moment, the stage-like lighting gave you no physiognomical information. The lamps shone on the crowns of the passing hats, but the faces beneath them were lost; all cats were grey. Any one of them might have been a giggling flapper with her eyes still sealed to Life, or one of those others mentioned by the too-curious author of the _Guide_, who would be dead to sight and thought for a space that didn't count. Light frocks and darker hues, bare heads and plaits and shawls and hooded dominoes, shop-girl and high-school girl, caps and straws and panamas, pipes and cigarettes, youths thoughtless and youths predatory--you paid your threepence at the turnstiles and watched them pass and repass. Drub-drub-drub.... And if you sat long enough, changes began to be perceptible. The flappers who were evidently high-school girls began to be fewer, and others took their places--for most of the shops of Llanyglo closed at nine or half-past, and the released waitresses and assistants who had been on their feet all day were still not too weary to add to the drub-drubbing. It was difficult to say in what particular these were distinguishable. It was not their dress--the universal attainment of a certain standard of dressing is one of our modern miracles. You would not have had it from their own lips--you would have been tactless in the extreme not to have assumed that they also were visitors (as a matter of fact, they would calmly make appointments for four o'clock of the next day, knowing perfectly well that at that hour they would be giving change in a cash-desk or hurrying hither and thither with piles of bread and butter and trays awash with spilt tea). Perhaps it was the young men they greeted and their way of greeting them. They didn't come out for these last hours of the day to gossip with those to whom they had called "Sign!" all the afternoon, their own foremen, companions, or the tradesmen of the shop opposite. Drub-drub--drub-drub----