In the afternoon Madame summoned her into the showrooms, and she assisted the exhausted young women at the sale of slightly damaged French hats to the unfashionable purchasers who preferred to pay reasonable prices.  While she served them, which she did with a cheerfulness, an interest, and an amiability that distinguished her from the other saleswomen, she wondered how they could have so little common sense as to allow themselves to be deluded by the French labels on the soiled linings?  She could have made a better hat in two hours than any one of those she sold at the reduced price of ten dollars; yet even the dingiest of them at last found a purchaser, and she saw the green velvet toque, which had been rejected by the sensible middle-aged woman in the morning, finally pass into the possession of a hard-featured spinster.  What amazed her, for she had a natural talent for dress, was the infallible instinct which guided the vast majority of these customers to the selection of the inappropriate.  A few of them had taste, or had learned from experience what they could not wear; but by far the larger number displayed an ignorance of the most elementary principles of dress which shocked and astonished Gabriella.  The obese and middle-aged winged straight as a bird toward the coquettish in millinery; the lean and haggard intuitively yearned for the picturesque; the harsh and simple aspired to the severely smart.  Yet beneath the vain misdirection of impulses there was some obscure principle of attraction which ruled the absurdity of the decisions.  Each woman, Gabriella discovered after an attentive hour at the sale, was dressing not her actual substance, but some passionately cherished ideal of herself which she had stored in a remote and inaccessible chamber of her brain.

In all of the tedious selections Gabriella assisted with the pleasant voice, the ready sympathy, and the quick understanding which had made her so popular when she had worked for the old shop in Broad Street.  The truth was that human nature interested her even in its errors, and her pleasant manners were simply the outward manifestation of an unaffected benevolence.

“I shouldn’t mind going there if they were all like that one,” remarked a customer, who had bought three hats, in the hearing of Madame as she went out; “but some of them are so disagreeable you feel like slapping their faces.  Once last winter I had that tall girl with red hair—­the handsome, stuck-up one, you know—­and I declare she was so downright impertinent that I got straight up and walked out without buying a thing.  Then I was so angry that I went down to Paula’s and paid seventy-five dollars for this hat I’ve got on.  It was a dreadful price, of course, but you’ll do anything when you’re in a rage.”

“Do you know the name of this one?  I’d like to remember it.”

“Yes, it’s Carr.  I asked for her card.  C-a-r-r.  I think she’s a widow.”

From her retreat behind one of the velvet curtains Madame overheard this conversation, and a few minutes later she stopped Gabriella on her way out, and said amiably that it would not be necessary for her to leave the showroom to-morrow.