Ruth had begun to work here informally, but she was yet to meet the owners and be officially hired. A bummer, because it meant people would have to like her, and Ruth wasn't good at making people like her. A greater bummer, because she had been told it was Mrs. Meijer who was present, and not her husband. Men were stupid, and stopped thinking altogether when women spread their legs. If they didn't like her, she at least knew how to make them want her - or so she told herself. But women she didn't trust. 

Reluctantly, she had put on her best dress (a red seventh-or-something-hand dress that had been fashionable fifteen years ago, brushed her dark curls and pulled them up in a bun, before deciding to let them down instead, and washed her face. She had applied a quick layer of paint on her lips and some rouge and then hurried up to the madam's office. She took a deep breath, breathed out again slowly, then knocked.