head. "Yes," said Madame Darbois, "but I come after these other
people. I will wait my turn."

The man shrugged his shoulders with an air of assurance. "Please
follow me, ladies."

They rose. A sound of discontent was audible.

"Silence," cried the official in fury. "If I hear any more noise, I
will turn you all out."

Silence descended again. Many of these women had come a long way. A
little dressmaker had left her workshop to bring her daughter. A big
chambermaid had obtained the morning's leave from the bourgeois house
where she worked. Her daughter stood beside her, a beautiful child of
sixteen with colourless hair, impudent as a magpie. A music teacher
with well-worn boots had excused herself from her pupils. Her two
daughters flanked her to right and left, Parisian blossoms, pale and
anaemic. Both wished to pass the entrance examinations, the one as an
ingenue in comedy, the other in tragedy. They were neither comic nor
tragic, but modest and charming. There was also a small shop-keeper,
covered with jewels. She sat very rigid, far forward on the bench,
compressed into a terrible corset which forced her breast and back
into the humps of a punchinello; her legs hanging just short of the
floor. Her daughter paced up and down the long room like a colt
snorting impatiently to be put through its paces. She had the beauty
of a classic type, without spot or blemish, but her joints looked too
heavy and her neck was thrust without grace between her large
shoulders. Anyone who looked into the future would have been able to
predict for her, with some certainty, an honourable career as a