to change it.”  An idea, a whole flock of ideas, came to her while she stood there with her rapt gaze on the green velvet toque, which nobody had bought, and which she knew would shortly be “marked down,” august French name included, from forty to fifteen and from fifteen to five dollars.  Her constructive imagination was at work recreating the business, and she saw it in fancy made over and made right from the bottom—­she saw Madame’s duplicity succeeded by something of Brandywine & Plummer’s inflexible honesty, and the flimsy base of the structure supplanted by a solid foundation of credit.  For she had come often enough to Dinard’s to discern the slipshod and unsystematic methods beneath the ornate and extravagant surface.  Her naturally quick powers of observation had detected at a glance conditions of which the elder Mrs. Fowler was never aware.  To sell gowns and hats at treble their actual value, to cajole her customers into buying what they did not want and what did not suit them, to give inferior goods, inferior workmanship, inferior style wherever they would be accepted, and to get always the most money for the least possible expenditure of ability, industry, and honesty—­these were the fundamental principles, Gabriella had already discovered, beneath Madame’s flourishing, but shallow-rooted, prosperity.  Brandywine & Plummer did not carry Parisian models; their shop was not fashionable in the way that the establishment of a New York dressmaker and milliner must be fashionable; but the standard of excellence in all things excepting style was far higher in the old Broad Street house in the middle ’nineties than it was at Madame Dinard’s during the early years of the new century.  Quality had been essential in every hat that went from Brandywine & Plummer’s millinery department; and Gabriella, deriving from a mother who worked only in fine linen, rejected instinctively the cheap, the tawdry, and the inferior.  She had heard a customer complain one day of the quality of the velvet on a hat Madame had made to order; and pausing to look at the material as she went out, she had decided that the most prosperous house in New York could not survive many incidents of that deplorable sort.  To be sure, such material would not have been supplied to Mrs. Pletheridge, or even to the elder Mrs. Fowler, who, though Southern, was always particular and very often severe; but here again, since this cheap hat had been sold at a high price, was a vital weakness in Madame’s business philosophy.

On the whole, there were many of Madame’s methods which might be improved; and when Gabriella passed through the ivory and gold doorway into the street, she had convinced herself that she was preëminently designed by Nature to undertake the necessary work of improvement.  The tawdriness she particularly disliked—­the trashy gold and ivory of the decorations, the artificial rose-bushes from which the dust was never removed, the sumptuous velvet carpets which were not taken up in the summer.