“What did it get her?” she asked as though to herself.  “I know what it does to a girl, seeing and handling stuff that’s made for millionaires, you get a taste for it yourself.  Take it from me, it ain’t the six-dollar girl that needs looking after.  She’s taking her little pay envelope home to her mother that’s a widow and it goes to buy milk for the kids.  Sometimes I think the more you get the more you want.  Somebody ought to turn that vice inquiry on to the tracks of that thirty-dollar-a-week girl in the Irish crochet waist and the diamond bar pin.  She’d make swell readin’.”

There fell a little silence between the two—­a silence of which neither was conscious.  Both were thinking, Myrtle disjointedly, purposelessly, all unconscious that her slow, untrained mind had groped for a great and vital truth and found it; Ray quickly, eagerly, connectedly, a new and daring resolve growing with lightning rapidity.

“There’s another new baby at our house,” she said aloud suddenly.  “It cries all night pretty near.”

“Ain’t they fierce?” laughed Myrtle.  “And yet I dunno—­”

She fell silent again.  Then with the half-sign with which we waken from day dreams she moved away in response to the beckoning finger of a saleswoman in the evening-coat section.  Ten minutes later her exquisite face rose above the soft folds of a black charmeuse coat that rippled away from her slender, supple body in lines that a sculptor dreams of and never achieves.

Ray Willets finished straightening her counter.  Trade was slow.  She moved idly in the direction of the black-garbed figure that flitted about in the costly atmosphere of the French section.  It must be a very special customer to claim Miss Jevne’s expert services.  Ray glanced in through the half-opened glass and ivory-enamel doors.

“Here, girl,” called Miss Jevne.  Ray paused and entered.  Miss Jevne was frowning.  “Miss Myrtle’s busy.  Just slip this on.  Careful now.  Keep your arms close to your head.”

She slipped a marvellously wrought garment over Ray’s sleek head.  Fluffy drifts of equally exquisite lingerie lay scattered about on chairs, over mirrors, across showtables.  On one of the fragile little ivory-and-rose chairs, in the centre of the costly little room, sat a large, blonde, perfumed woman who clanked and rustled and swished as she moved.  Her eyes were white-lidded and heavy, but strangely bright.  One ungloved hand was very white too, but pudgy and covered so thickly with gems that your eye could get no clear picture of any single stone or setting.

Ray, clad in the diaphanous folds of the robe-de-nuit that was so beautifully adorned with delicate embroideries wrought by the patient, needle-scarred fingers of some silent, white-faced nun in a far-away convent, paced slowly up and down the short length of the room that the critical eye of this coarse, unlettered creature might behold the wonders woven by this weary French nun, and, beholding, approve.