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.
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