To receive Madame’s customers and display Madame’s models were the last occupations Gabriella would have chosen had she been able to penetrate Madame’s frivolous wig to her busy brain and detect her prudent schemes for the future; but the girl was sick of her dependence on George’s father, and, in the revolt of her pride, she would have accepted any honest work which would have enabled her to escape from the insecurity of her position.  Of her competence to earn a living, of her ability to excel in any work that she undertook, of the sufficiency and soundness of her resources, she was as absolutely assured as she had been when she entered the millinery department of Brandywine & Plummer.  If Madame, starting penniless, had nevertheless contrived, through her native abilities, to support three husbands and six children, surely the capable and industrious Gabriella might assume smaller burdens with the certainty of moderate success.  It was not, when one considered it, the life which one would have chosen, but who, since the world began, had ever lived exactly the life of his choice?  Many women, she reflected stoically, were far worse off than she, since she started not only with a modicum of business experience (for surely the three months with Brandywine & Plummer might weigh as that) but with a knowledge of the world and a social position which she had found to be fairly marketable.  That Madame Dinard would have accepted an unknown and undistinguished applicant for work at a salary of fifteen dollars a week she did not for an instant imagine.  This inadequate sum, she concluded with a touch of ironic humour, represented the exact value in open market of her marriage to George.

In the front room, where a sparse mid-winter collection of hats ornamented the scattered stands, she stopped for a few minutes to inspect, with a critical eye, the dingy array.  “I wonder what makes them buy so many they can’t sell?” she said half aloud to the model at which she was gazing.  “Nobody would wear these hats—­certainly nobody who could afford to buy Parisian models.  I could design far better hats than these, I myself, and if I were the head of the house I should never have accepted any of them, no matter who bought them.  I suppose, after all, it’s the fault of the buyer, but it’s a waste—­it’s not economy.”

Lifting a green velvet toque trimmed with a skinny white ostrich feather from the peg before which she was standing, she surveyed the august French name emblazoned in gold on the lining.  “Everything isn’t good that comes from Paris,” she thought, with a shrug which was worthy of Madame at her best.  “Why, I wonder, can’t Americans produce ‘ideas’ themselves?  Why do we always have to depend on the things the French send over to us?  Half the hats and gowns Madame has aren’t really good, and yet she makes people pay tremendous prices for things she knows are bad and undistinguished.  All that ought to be changed, and if I ever succeed, if I ever catch on, I am going