"You! Why, Mrs. Valentine, it's not work for a lady! Look at my hands."
But Audrey made an impatient gesture.
"I don't care about my hands. The question is, could I do it? I don't
seem able to do anything else."
"Why, yes." Clare was reluctant. "I can, and you're a lot cleverer than
I am. But it's hard. It's rough, and some of the talk--oh, I hope you
don't mean it, Mrs. Valentine."
Audrey, however, was meaning it. It seemed to her, all at once, the way
out. Here was work, needed work. Work that she could do. For the first
time in months she blessed the golf and riding that had kept her fit.
"Mr. Spencer is a friend of yours. He'll never let you do it."
"He is not to know, Clare," Audrey said briskly. "You are quite right.
He would probably be very--mannish about it. So we won't tell him. And
now, how shall I go about getting in? Will they teach me, or shall I
have to lust learn? And whatever shall I wear?"
Clare explained while, for she was determined not to lose a minute,
Audrey changed into her plainest clothes. They would be in time, if they
hurried, before the employment department closed. There were women in
charge there. They card-indexed you, and then you were investigated by
the secret service and if you were all right, well, that was all.
"Mercy! It's enough," said Audrey, impatiently. "Do you mean to say
they'll come here?"
She glanced around her rooms, littered with photographs of people well
known to the public through the society journals, with its high bright
silver vases, its odd gifts of porcelain, its grand piano taking up more
than its share of room.
"If they come here," she deliberated, "they won't take me, Clare.
They'll be thinking I'm living on German money!"
So, in the end, she did not go to the munition works. She went
room-hunting instead, with Clare beside her, very uncomfortable on the
street for fear Audrey would be compromised by walking with her. And at
six o'clock that evening a young woman with a softly inflected voice and
an air of almost humorous enjoyment of something the landlady failed
to grasp, was the tenant, for one month's rent in advance, of a room on
South Perry Street.
Clare was almost in tears.
"I can't bear to think of your sleeping in that bed, Mrs. Valentine,"
she protested. "It dips down so."