The Ladies' Paradise. Эмиль Золя

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      "It isn't true," replied Marguerite. "She pushed past me at the door, but I had already one foot in the room."

      The matter in dispute was their inscription on the list of turns, which regulated the sales. The girls wrote their names on a slate in the order of their arrival, and whenever one of them had served a customer, she re-inscribed her name beneath the others. Madame Aurélie finished by deciding in Marguerite's favour.

      "Always some injustice here!" muttered Clara, furiously.

      However Denise's entry reconciled these young ladies. They looked at her, then smiled at each other. How could a person truss herself up in that way! The young girl went and awkwardly wrote her name on the list, where she found herself last. Meanwhile, Madame Aurélie examined her with an anxious pout and could not help saying:

      "My dear, two like you could get into your dress; you must have it taken in. Besides, you don't know how to dress yourself. Come here and let me arrange you a bit."

      Then she placed her before one of the tall glasses alternating with the massive doors of the cupboards containing the dresses. The spacious apartment, surrounded by these mirrors and carved oak wood-work, its floor covered with red carpet of a large pattern, resembled the commonplace drawing-room of an hotel, traversed by a continual stream of travellers. The young ladies dressed in regulation silk, and promenading their charms about, without ever sitting down on the dozen chairs reserved for the customers, completed the resemblance. Between two button-holes of their dress bodies they all wore a long pencil, with its point in the air; and protruding from their pockets, you could see the white leaves of a book of debit-notes. Several ventured to wear jewellery—rings, brooches and chains; but their great coquetry, the point of display in which, given the forced uniformity of their dress they all struggled for pre-eminence, was their hair, hair ever overflowing, its volume augmented by plaits and chignons when their own did not suffice, and combed, curled, and decked in every possible fashion.

      "Pull the waist down in front," said Madame Aurélie to Denise. "There, you now have no hump on your back. And your hair, how can you massacre it like that? It would be superb, if you only took a little trouble."

      This was, in fact, Denise's only beauty. Of a beautiful flaxen hue, it fell to her ankles: and when she did it up, it was so troublesome that she simply rolled it in a knot, keeping it together with the strong teeth of a bone comb. Clara, greatly annoyed by the sight of this abundant hair, affected to laugh at it, so strange did it look, twisted up anyhow with savage grace. She made a sign to a saleswoman in the under-linen department, a girl with a broad face and agreeable manner. The two departments, which adjoined one another, were ever at variance, still the young ladies sometimes joined together in laughing at other people.

      "Mademoiselle Cugnot, just look at that mane," said Clara, whom Marguerite was nudging, also feigning to be on the point of bursting into laughter.

      But Mademoiselle Cugnot was not in the humour for joking. She had been looking at Denise for a moment and remembered what she had suffered herself during the first few months after her arrival in the establishment.