Madame, as she was familiarly known, was in fact a Bavarian, who must have been beautiful in her day, with an immense bust that concealed a most kind heart, and piles of fair hair, obviously her own, that she amassed in pyramids on the top of her head. There was generally a cigarette between her lips, and she used a lorgnette lavishly. She was in fact an efficient woman of the world, saved from the dreadful vices of the efficient by a genuinely benignant nature. And she avowed openly that it was her mission in life to give people what they wanted--propriety to the proper, and pleasure to the pleasure-seeking. Ernie had been at the hotel nearly a year when there came to the Third Floor a maid who seemed strangely out of her element. He noted her advent at once with surprise and a sense of shame. Amid her saucy colleagues she seemed a lily of the valley blowing stately amid artificial flowers. A big young woman and beautiful, she held herself apart, moving among the others, apparently unconscious of them, and ignorant of the meretricious atmosphere, as a Madonna walking through the ballet of a music-hall revue. Her presence filled him with acute personal discomfort. He did not like the tone of the Third Floor, but he accepted it as he accepted everything with the easy tolerance that was his weakness. This majestic young woman with her aloof and noble air, her accusing innocence, her damning purity, filled him with shame and pity--shame for himself and his weak-kneed benevolence, pity for those others whom she with her unconscious dignity made appear so small and vulgar. Her name was Ruth, so much Ernie knew, and she was English too, though she scarcely looked it: for she was very dark, her hair black as a horse's mane, with a skin that had a peculiar ruddy warmth, and the large brown eyes full of splendid darkness and mellow lights, that are so rare and therefore so noticeable when found among the working-classes that fringe the North Sea. Her brows, black as her hair and broadly splashed, almost met; but there was nothing of ferocity about her. Her natural habit, Ernie saw, was that of a great and mysteriously growing tree, its roots deep in the red earth; its massive foliage drinking of the goodness of sunshine and wind and rain; but now there was about her a note of restraint, even of stress. The easy flow of her nature was being dammed. She seemed out of place and dumbly aware of it, like a creature of the wilderness in a strange environment. The profound and quiet joyousness of woman, maturing to ripe perfection, which should have been hers to an unusual degree, was not. Ernie was desperately shy of her. He would peep at her as she passed him on her swift way; she never looked at him.