How many of us, as we sit at ease on the customer’s side of the counter, reflect upon the life led by the spruce, black-coated young man or the trim, deft young woman who stands upon the other? For myself, the elaborate hairdressing of the shop-girl—all those curls and waves and puffs that represent so much care and time—always sets me thinking of the same girl before her looking-glass (taking her turn, probably, with others). The dormitory in which she occupies a place is bare and unhomelike, all the beds, chairs, and chests of drawers of the same pattern; the walls unadorned, for the decoration of them is forbidden. As the rule of one large establishment says, with equal harshness and bad grammar: “No pictures, photos, etc., allowed to disfigure the walls. Any one so doing will be charged with the repairs.” The room is chill in winter and stuffy at all seasons, and her companions are chosen by chance. Amid such surroundings she combs and rolls and twists with the skill of a practised lady’s maid, in preparation, not for an evening’s gaiety, but for a day’s toil. Hastily she crams into the small chest of drawers which is her sole receptacle all her little apparatus of brush and comb and curlers and wavers. For what says the rule? “Brushes, bottles, etc., must not be left about in the room, but put away in the drawers. Anything so left will be considered done for.” Carefully dressed as to the head, but very inadequately washed—for baths are too often lacking and hot water seldom provided in the mornings—the young lady hurries down to breakfast in a dining-room which has the same impersonal, depressing character as the dormitory. Too often it is a basement room, and sometimes infested by black beetles. Here, among a crowd of companions, she takes her meal, consisting in the great majority of cases, of bread and butter and weak tea.