For a few minutes she allowed her fancy to play with the comforting memory of Arthur’s devotion—­with the image of her photograph on his bureau and the single rose in the vase he kept always before it.  “But for an accident I might have loved him,” she said, and the thought of this love which might have been sent a wave of sweetness to her heart.  “I might have loved him and been happy.”  The vision was so dangerously beautiful that she put it resolutely away from her, and told herself, with an effort to be philosophical, that there was no use whatever in regretting the past, and since love was over for her, she must set her mind to solve the problem of work.  “I’ve got my life to live,” she said with stoical calmness, “and however bad it is I’ve nobody to blame for it but myself.”

Then, because she had only one talent, however small, she changed her dress, and went out to ask for a position as designer, saleswoman, or milliner in the house of Dinard.

The Irish woman, voluble, painted, powdered, bewigged, and with the remains of her handsome figure laced into a black satin gown, nodded her false golden locks and smiled an ambiguous smile when she heard the explanation of young Mrs. Fowler’s afternoon call.

“But, no, it ees impossible,” she protested, forgetting her foreign shrug and preserving with difficulty the trace of an accent.  Then, becoming suddenly natural as she realized that no immediate profit was to be derived from affectation, she added decisively, “you have no training, and I have quite as many salesladies as I need at this season.  Not that you are not chic,” she hastened to conclude, “not that you would not in appearance be an adornment to any establishment.”

“I am willing to do anything,” said Gabriella, pressing her point with characteristic tenacity.  “I want to learn, you know, I want to learn everything I possibly can.  You yourself told me that I had a natural gift for designing, and I am anxious to turn it to some account.  I believe I can make a very good milliner, and I want to try.”

“But what would Madame Fowler, your mother-in-law, say to this?  Surely no one would want to earn her living unless she was obliged to.”

For Madame had known life, as she often remarked, and the knowledge so patiently acquired had gone far to confirm her natural suspicion of human nature.  She had got on, as she observed in confidential moments, by believing in nobody; and this skepticism, which was fundamental and rooted in principle, had inspired her behaviour not only to her patrons, but to her husband, her children, her domestic servants, her tradespeople, and the policeman at the corner.  Thirty years ago she had suspected the entire masculine world of amorous designs upon her person; to-day, secretly numbering her years at sixty-two, and publicly acknowledging forty-five of them, she suspected the same world of equally active, if less romantic, intentions regarding her purse.  And if she distrusted men,