“It ain’t bad,” spake the blonde woman grudgingly.  “How much did you say?”

“Ninety-five,” Miss Jevne made answer smoothly.  “I selected it myself when I was in France my last trip.  A bargain.”

She slid the robe carefully over Ray’s head.  The frown came once more to her brow.  She bent close to Ray’s ear.  “Your waist’s ripped under the left arm.  Disgraceful!”

The blonde woman moved and jangled a bit in her chair.  “Well, I’ll take it,” she sighed.  “Look at the colour on that girl!  And it’s real too.”  She rose heavily and came over to Ray, reached up and pinched her cheek appraisingly with perfumed white thumb and forefinger.

“That’ll do, girl,” said Miss Jevne sweetly.  “Take this along and change these ribbons from blue to pink.”

Ray Willets bore the fairy garment away with her.  She bore it tenderly, almost reverently.  It was more than a garment.  It represented in her mind a new standard of all that was beautiful and exquisite and desirable.

Ten days before the formal opening of the new twelve-story addition there was issued from the superintendent’s office an order that made a little flurry among the clerks in the sections devoted to women’s dress.  The new store when thrown open would mark an epoch in the retail drygoods business of the city, the order began.  Thousands were to be spent on perishable decorations alone.  The highest type of patronage was to be catered to.  Therefore the women in the lingerie, negligee, millinery, dress, suit and corset sections were requested to wear during opening week a modest but modish black one-piece gown that would blend with the air of elegance which those departments were to maintain.

Ray Willets of the lingerie and negligee sections read her order slip slowly.  Then she reread it.  Then she did a mental sum in simple arithmetic.  A childish sum it was.  And yet before she got her answer the solving of it had stamped on her face a certain hard, set, resolute look.

The store management had chosen Wednesday to be the opening day.  By eight-thirty o’clock Wednesday morning the French lingerie, millinery and dress sections, with their women clerks garbed in modest but modish black one-piece gowns, looked like a levee at Buckingham when the court is in mourning.  But the ladies-in-waiting, grouped about here and there, fell back in respectful silence when there paced down the aisle the queen royal in the person of Miss Jevne.  There is a certain sort of black gown that is more startling and daring than scarlet.  Miss Jevne’s was that style.  Fast black you might term it.  Miss Jevne was aware of the flurry and flutter that followed her majestic progress down the aisle to her own section.  She knew that each eye was caught in the tip of the little dog-eared train that slipped and slunk and wriggled along the ground, thence up to the soft drapery caught so cunningly just below the knee, up higher to the marvelously simple sash