Her mother fell asleep on the same thought. Apparently the excitement of it was too much for her, for she woke up suddenly, to hear the clock strike three, and found she could not get to sleep again because at once, in a joyful confusion, her mind was filled with a rush of happy thoughts, “I am to have Miss Flynn’s place. Three thousand a year. And a bonus! In a year or so I ought to be making four thousand.” _Four thousand dollars!_ They had never had more than eighteen hundred. Her thoughts vibrated happily between plans of what they could do here at the house and plans of what she would do in the reorganization of the department at the store. For some time, as she lay awake, her mind was as active and concrete and concentrated on her work as ever in the store; she was planning a system of post-card notices to customers when something especially suited to one or another came in:--“Dear Mrs. Russell: Among the new things in the department which have just come in from New York are some smocked, hand-made children’s dresses that look exactly like your little Margery....” “Dear Miss Pelman: Do you remember the suit you did not buy because of the horizontal trimming on the skirt? Mr. Willing found in New York last week the same suit without that line. I am laying it aside till you can drop in to look at it.” She wondered if she could let her salesgirls send out such cards too. No, it must be done with great discretion--above all must not seem too urgent. People didn’t like to feel they were being hunted down. She stepped about mentally among the innumerable details of her plans with her usual orderly mastery of them, her usual animated interest in them, her usual unquestioning acceptance of them as important. From them she went on to plans for a series of educational talks to her salesgirls about the fabrics and styles and fine points of their merchandise. She wished she could do the same thing for the girls in the Ladies’ Waist and Sweater Department. There were some such bright girls there, but so ignorant of their business. They’d pick it up in no time if they had the chance, if she were allowed to.... Why! With a tremor all over her, she wondered if some time she might not be not only head of her own department, but superintendent for all that floor. By a flash of prescience she suddenly knew as she lay there alone in the quiet that the road to advancement lay open before her, that she could step along surely and steadily to success and take her dearly loved children with her, working for them with all her might, profoundly thankful to be able to give them what she had always so tragically and impotently wished them to have. The wideness of this thought, the blackness of the night, the unwonted prone passivity of her energetic body, all wrought upon her to a strange softness of mood. She felt almost like a girl again ... dreaming.