And she placed herself before one of the tall glasses alternating with the doors of the cupboards containing the dresses. The vast apartment, surrounded by these glasses and the wood-work in carved oak, the floor covered with red Wilton carpet of a large pattern, resembled the commonplace drawing-room of an hotel, traversed by a continual stream of travellers. The young ladies completed the resemblance, dressed in the regulation silk, promenading their commercial charms about, without ever sitting down on the dozen chairs reserved for the customers. All wore between two buttonholes of the body of their dresses, as if stuck in their bosoms, a long pencil, with its point in the air; and half out of their pockets, could be seen the white cover of the book of debit-notes. Several risked wearing jewellery--rings, brooches, chains; but their great coquetry, the luxury they all struggled for in the forced uniformity of their dress, was their bare hair, quantities of it, augmented by plaits and chignons when their own did not suffice, combed, curled, and decked out in every way. “Pull the waist down in front,” said Madame Aurélie. “There, you have now no hump on your back. And your hair, how can you massacre it like that? It would be superb, if you only took a little trouble.” This was, in fact, Denise's only beauty. Of a beautiful flaxen hue, it fell down to her ankles; and when she did it up, it was so troublesome that she simply rolled it in a knot, keeping it together under the strong teeth of a bone comb. Clara, greatly annoyed by this head of hair, affected to laugh at it, so strange did it look, twisted up anyhow in its savage grace. She made a sign to a saleswoman in the under-linen department, a girl with a large face and agreeable manner. The two departments, which were close together, were in continual hostility; but the young ladies sometimes joined together in laughing at other people. “Mademoiselle Cugnot, just look at that mane,” said Clara, whom Marguerite was nudging, feigning also to be on the point of bursting out laughing. But Mademoiselle Cugnot was not in the humour for joking. She had been looking at Denise for a moment, and she remembered what she had suffered herself during the first few months of her arrival in the establishment. “Well, what?” said she. “Everybody hasn't got a mane like that!”