"Oh, _you_ needn't worry, Smithie," said Miss Umpleby, her chair tilted back so that her primrose hair and clasped hands rested against the coats and jackets on the wall. "They always want somebody to run about and be useful. Hilda and I'll be the ladies till August. We shall come back again with the Furs."
Hilda Jeyes had her elbows on the table; she was munching an apple.
"It all comes of our being kept at the one thing, over and over again," she declared. "Look at me: what am I? A Camisole Specialist! Why, if I was to be set to do Damask, or Mourning, or Boots, like Benny, I should no more know where to begin than I could fly! If only that girl on the _Daily Spec_ would die! I'd be after her place in two twos, I promise you!"
"They never die when they're on newspapers," Miss Umpleby remarked, with the detached air of one who reminds her hearers of a well-known fact in mortality statistics. "Splendid thing for the health. I wonder the doctors don't prescribe it."
"And when they get married they stick to their jobs just the same," another girl commented. (To be on the staff of a newspaper, it may be said, is the prize of the fashion-artist's profession.)
"No ladies with one foot on a chair for the _Daily Spec_, like the one you began this morning," Miss Umpleby remarked.
"Well, what chance have we here, I should like to know, with one roughing out all the time, and another doing nothing but heads, and another the curly-cues! There isn't one of us except Benny who could do a job right through!" Hilda Jeyes grumbled.
"Just so that we can turn the stuff out quicker!" somebody else joined in. "'Holiday's' a good name for it, I _don't_ think!"
Miss Umpleby turned her eyes nonchalantly to the coats above her head. "Monte Carlo for me, I think," she said. "Then I shall be able to put in those petticoat bodices with Casino backgrounds and do somebody else out of a job."
Hilda Jeyes threw away the core of her apple. "You needn't growl, anyway, Umpy. You are engaged."
"So I am," remarked Miss Umpleby, as if she had just remembered it. "I think I'll ring my source of trouble up now." She brought the chair down on to its fore-legs again. "Tell me if Benny comes. You can all listen if you like.--Hallo, Exchange!--One-six-double-one Hop!"
