The lodging-house of 'Vallambrosa' is two old houses which have been made into one. One of them has a hat shop on the ground floor, the other has a dentist. And on the other floors , you can have a room for $2 a week, or for $20. Among the people who live there are typists, musicians, businessmen, shop-girls, wriers, artists and many other people who look with great curiosity down the stairs when the door-bell rings. At six o'clock one afternoon Hetty Pepper came back to her third floor back room ($3.50 a week) with her nose and chin more sharply pointed than usual. When you have to leave the large department store where you have worked for four years, and you have only fifteen cents in your purse, it does make you look like that. Hetty had walked into the Biggest Store one morning, four years before, with seventy-five other girls, all anxious for a job. The young man whose job was to take on six of the seventy-five looked at the sea of yellow-haired beauties, and felt like a drowning man. And then he saw Hetty Pepper, with her sharp ugly little face, her small green eyes and her hair the colour of chocolate; Hetty Pepper, with every one of her twenty-nine years of life clear for all to see.