“I began that way myself, Mrs. Fowler.  You may not believe it, but I was once slenderer than you are—­my waist measured only nineteen inches and my bust thirty-six—­just the figure a man most admires.  The result was, you see, that I have had four husbands, though it is true that I supported three of them, and it is always easy to marry if one provides the support.  Men are like that.  It is their nature.  Yes, I began that way with little training, but much natural talent, and a head full of ideas.  If one has ideas it is always possible to become a success, but they are rarer even than waists measuring nineteen inches.  And I had charm, though you might not believe it now, for charm does not wear.  But I made my way up from the bottom, first as errand girl, at the age of ten, and I made it, not by work, for I could never handle a needle, but by ideas.  They were once plentiful, and now they are so scarce,” she broke off with a sigh of resignation which seemed to accept every fact of experience except the fact of age.  “It was a hard life, but it was life, after all.  One is not put here to be contented, or one would dread death too much for the purpose of God.”  In spite of her uncompromising materialism, she was not without an ineradicable streak of superstition which she would probably have called piety.

“I am ready to begin at once—­to-morrow,” said Gabriella, and she added without explanation, obeying, perhaps, an intuitive feeling that to explain a statement is to weaken it, “and I should like to be called by my maiden name while I am here—­just Mrs. Carr, if you don’t mind.”

To this request Madame agreed with effusion, if not with sincerity.  For her own part she would have preferred to speak of her saleswoman as young Mrs. Fowler; but she reflected comfortably that many of her patrons would know young Mrs. Fowler by sight at least, and to the others she might conveniently drop a word or two in due season.  To drop a word or two would provide entertainment throughout the length of a fitting; and, for the rest, the mystery of the situation had its charm for the romantic Irish strain in her blood.  The prospect of securing both entertainment and mystery at the modest expenditure of fifteen dollars a week impressed her as very good business, for she combined in the superlative degree the opposite qualities of romance and economy.  To be sure, except for the advertisement she afforded and the gossip she provided, young Mrs. Fowler might not prove to be worth even her modest salary; but there was, on the other hand, a remote possibility that she might turn out to be gifted, and Madame would then be able to use her inventiveness to some purpose before the gifted one discovered her value.  In any case, Madame was at liberty to discharge her with a day’s notice, and her salary would hardly be increased for three months even should she persist in her eccentricity and develop a positive talent for dressmaking.  And if young Mrs. Fowler could do nothing else, Madame reflected as they parted, she could at least receive customers and display models with an imposing, even an aristocratic, demeanour.