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Updated: May 11, 2025
Mavis's anger, once urged to boiling point by what she had learned of old Orgles's practices, did not easily cool; it remained at a high temperature, and called into being all the feeling of revolt, of which she was capable, against the hideous injustice and the infamous wrongs to which girls were exposed who sought employment at "Dawes'," or who, having got this, wished for promotion.
"There's no one to see you." Mavis looked dubious. "It's either that or picking up 'boys," remarked Miss Meakin. "Picking up boys!" echoed Mavis, with a note of indignation in her voice. "It's what the girls do here if they don't want to go hungry." "But I don't quite understand." "Didn't you come here through old Orgles's influence?" asked Miss Meakin guardedly.
She took her lover aside and urged him to report to the management Mavis's obstinacy; he resisted, wavered, surrendered. Mavis saw the Marquis speak to a shopman, of whom he seemed to be asking her name; he was then conducted upstairs to Mr Orgles's office, from which he issued, a few minutes later, to be bowed obsequiously downstairs by the man he had been to see.
She said all she could think of, but Mr Orgles remained silent; she anxiously scanned his face in the hope of getting some encouragement from its expression, but she might as well have stared at a brick wall for all the enlightenment she got. Then followed a few moments' pause, during which her eyes were riveted on Mr Orgles's nostrils: these were prominent, large, dilating; they fascinated her.
Orgles's head was now upon one side, so that one of his eyes was able to glare hungrily at her; his big nostrils were dilating with the violence of his passion. Mavis trembled with a fierce, resentful rage. "Your answer: your answer: your answer?" gasped the man huskily. "This: this: this!" cried Mavis, punctuating each word with a blow from her right hand upon Orgles's face. "This: this: this!
"What did your friend mean last night by saying I'd been through Orgles's hands?" "She thought he introduced you here?" "What's that to do with it?"
"If you think you can insult me like that, you're mistaken," said Mavis, with icy calmness, the while she trembled in every limb. "Haven't you been through Orgles's hands?" asked Miss Potter. "No, I have not. I say again, how dare you accuse me of that?" "She didn't mean it, dear," said Miss Allen appeasingly; "she's always said you're the only pretty girl who's straight in 'Dawes'."
Mavis waited in suspense, expecting every minute to be summoned to Orgles's presence. She did not regret what she had done, but, as the hours passed and she was not sent for, she more and more feared the consequences of her behaviour. When she came upstairs from tea, she received a message saying that Mr Orgles wished to see her.
The Marquis's demand, the circumstances in which it was made, seemed part and parcel of a system of oppression, of which old Orgles's sending dozens of girls "on the game," who might otherwise have kept straight, was another portion. The realisation of this fact awoke in Mavis a burning sense of injustice; it only needed a spark to cause an explosion. This was not long in coming.
After all, there was One who cared: the contents of the two letters which she had just received proved that; the cheque and promise of employment were in the nature of compensation for the hurt to her pride which she had suffered yesterday at Orgles's hands.
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