In the old days, when Dinard’s was a small and exclusive house in one of the blocks just off Fifth Avenue, Madame would have scorned to combine the making of gowns and hats in a single establishment; but as she advanced in years and in worldly experience, she discovered that millinery drew the unwary passer-by even more successfully than dressmaking did.  Then, too, hats were easy to handle; they sold for at least four or five times as much as they actually cost; and so, gradually, while she was still unaware of the disintegrating processes within, Madame’s principles had crumbled before the temptation of increasing profits.  A lapse of virtue, perhaps, but Madame, who had been born an O’Grady, was not the first to discover that one’s virtuous principles are apt to modify with one’s years.  The time was when she had despised false hair, having a natural wealth of her own, and now, with a few thin gray strands hidden under her golden wig, she had become morally reconciled to necessity.  “It is a hard world, and one lives as one must,” was her favourite maxim.

On the whole, however, having a philosophic bent of mind, she endeavoured to preserve, with rosy cheeks and golden hair, several other cheerful fictions of her youth.  The chief of these, the artless delusion that, in spite of her obesity, her wig and her rouge, she still had power to charm the masculine eye, offered to her lively nature a more effective support than any virtuous principle could have supplied.  A perennial, if ridiculous, coquetry sweetened her days and added sprightliness to the gay decline of her life.  Being frankly material, she had confined her energies to the two unending pursuits of men and money, and having captured four husbands and acquired a comfortable bank account, she might have been content, had she been as discreet as she was provident, to rest on her substantial achievements.  But the trouble with both men and money, when considered solely as rewards to enterprise, is that the quest of them is inexhaustible.  One’s income, however large, may reasonably become larger, and there is no limit to the number of husbands a prudent and fortunate woman may collect.  And so age, which is, after all, a state of mind, not a term of years, was rendered harmless to Madame by her simple plan of refusing to acknowledge that it existed.  This came of keeping one’s head, she sometimes thought, though she never put her thought into words—­this and all things else, including financial security and the perpetual pursuit of the elusive and lawless male.  For at sixty-two she still felt young and she believed herself to be fascinating.