she both distrusted and despised women.  She distrusted and despised them because they were poor workers, because they were idlers by nature, because they allowed themselves to be cheated, slighted, underpaid, underfed, and oppressed, and, most of all, she despised them because they were the victims of their own emotions.  Love was all very well, she was accustomed to observe, as a pleasurable pursuit, but, as with any other pursuit, when it began to impair the appetite and to affect the quality and the quantity of one’s work, then a serious person would at once contrive to get rid of the passion.  And Madame prided herself with reason upon being a strictly serious person.  She had been through the experience of love innumerable times; she had lost four husbands, and, as she pointed out with complacency, she was still living.

In the dubious splendour of her showrooms, which were curtained and carpeted in velvet, and decorated with artificial rose-bushes flowering magnificently from white and gold jardinières, six arrogant young women, in marvellously fitting gowns of black satin, strolled back and forth all day long, or stood gracefully, with the exaggerated curve of the period, awaiting possible customers.  Though they were as human within as Madame Dinard—­and beneath her make-up she was very human indeed—­nothing so variable as an expression ever crossed the waxlike immobility of their faces; and while they trailed their black satin trains over the rich carpets, amid the lustrous piles of silks and velvets which covered the white and gold tables, they appeared to float through an atmosphere of eternal enchantment.  Watching them, Gabriella wondered idly if they could ever unbend at the waist, if they could ever let down those elaborate and intricate piles of hair.  Then she overheard the tallest and most arrogant of them remark, “I’m just crazy about him, but he’s dead broke,” and she realized that they also belonged to the unsatisfied world of humanity.

Madame, who had slipped away to answer the telephone, came rustling back, and sank, wheezing, into a white and gilt chair, which was too small to contain the whole of her ample person.  Though she had spoken quite sharply at the telephone, her voice was mellifluous when she attuned it to Gabriella.

“That gown is perfect on you,” she remarked in honied accents.  “It was one of my best models last season, and as I said before, Madame, you are so fortunate as to wear your clothes with a grace.”  She was urbane, but she was anxious to be rid of her, this young Mrs. Fowler could see at a glance.  “Your head is well set on your shoulders, and that is rare—­very rare!  It would surprise you to know how few women have heads that are well set on their shoulders.  Yes, I understand.  You wish to learn, but not to make a living.  That is very good, for the only comfortable way for a woman to make her living is to marry one—­a man is the only perfectly satisfactory means of livelihood.