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was running to her shoe, and her stocking was torn in a jagged hole. She pushed some skin back into place, and feeling sickened, leaned against the wall and held to a water pipe. She stayed there a few seconds, listening to the confusion of voices among the girls at the mirror. Then she wet toilet paper and daubed until the red was gone from her stocking, but the red kept coming.
    “It’s all right, thanks,” she said to a girl who bent over her for a moment, and the girl went away.
    Finally, there was nothing to do but buy a sanitary napkin from the slot machine. She used a little of the cotton from inside it, and tied it on her leg with the gauze. And then it was time to go back to the counter.
    Their eyes met at the same instant, Therese glancing up from a box she was opening, and the woman just turning her head so she looked directly at Therese. She was tall and fair, her long figure graceful in the loose fur coat that she held open with a hand on her waist. Her eyes were gray, colorless, yet dominant as light or fire, and caught by them, Therese could not look away. She heard the customer in front of her repeat a question, and Therese stood there, mute. The woman was looking at Therese, too, with a preoccupied expression as if half her mind were on whatever it was she meant to buy here, and though there were a number of salesgirls between them, Therese felt sure the woman would come to her.
    Then Therese saw her walk slowly toward the counter, heard her heart stumble to catch up with the moment it had let pass, and felt her face grow hot as the woman came nearer and nearer.
    “May I see one of those valises?” the woman asked, and leaned on the counter, looking down through the glass top.
    The damaged valise lay only a yard away. Therese turned around and got a box from the bottom of a stack, a box that had never been opened. When she stood up, the woman was looking at her with the calm gray eyes that Therese could neither quite face nor look away from.
    “That’s the one I like, but I don’t suppose I can have it, can I?” she said, nodding toward the brown valise in the show window behind Therese.
    Her eyebrows were blond, curving around the bend of her forehead. Her mouth was as wise as her eyes, Therese thought, and her voice was like her coat, rich and supple, and somehow full of secrets.
    “Yes,” Therese said.
    Therese went back to the stockroom for the key. The key hung just inside the door on a nail, and no one was allowed to touch it but Mrs. Hendrickson.
    Miss Davis saw her and gasped, but Therese said, “I need it,” and went out.
    She opened the show window and took the suitcase down and laid it on the counter.
    “You’re giving me the one on display?” She smiled as if she understood.
    She said casually, leaning both forearms on the counter, studying the contents of the valise, “They’ll have a fit, won’t they?”
    “It doesn’t matter,” Therese said.
    “All right. I’d like this. That’s C. O. D. And what about clothes? Do these come with it?”
    There were cellophane wrapped clothes in the lid of the suitcase, with a price tag on them. Therese said, “No, they’re separate. If you want doll clothes—these aren’t as good as the clothes in the dolls’ clothing department across the aisle.”
    “Oh! Will this get to New Jersey before Christmas?”
    “Yes, it’ll arrive Monday.” If it didn’t, Therese thought, she would deliver it herself.
    “Mrs. H. F. Aird,” the woman’s soft, distinct voice said, and Therese began to print it on the green C. O. D. slip.
    The name, the address, the town appeared beneath the pencil point like a secret Therese would never forget, like something stamping itself in her memory forever.
    “You won’t make any mistakes, will you?” the woman’s voice asked.
    Therese noticed the woman’s perfume for the first time, and instead of replying, could only shake her head. She looked down at the slip to which she was laboriously adding the