"You'll kill yourself."
Then as they began hammering at the door, she shut the window like a
good-natured girl and threw her friend's clothes down into a cupboard.
She was already resigned to her fate and comforted herself with the
thought that, after all, if she were to be put on the official list she
would no longer be so "beastly frightened" as of yore. So she pretended
to be heavy with sleep. She yawned; she palavered and ended by opening
the door to a tall, burly fellow with an unkempt beard, who said to her:
"Show your hands! You've got no needle pricks on them: you don't work.
Now then, dress!"
"But I'm not a dressmaker; I'm a burnisher," Satin brazenly declared.
Nevertheless, she dressed with much docility, knowing that argument was
out of the question. Cries were ringing through the hotel; a girl was
clinging to doorposts and refusing to budge an inch. Another girl, in
bed with a lover, who was answering for her legality, was acting the
honest woman who had been grossly insulted and spoke of bringing an
action against the prefect of police. For close on an hour there was
a noise of heavy shoes on the stairs, of fists hammering on doors, of
shrill disputes terminating in sobs, of petticoats rustling along the
walls, of all the sounds, in fact, attendant on the sudden awakening and
scared departure of a flock of women as they were roughly packed off by
three plain-clothes men, headed by a little oily-mannered, fair-haired
commissary of police.
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