“Did you send for me, Madame?” she asked, and waited, grave, attentive, and perfectly composed, with her hand, the small, strong hand of the Carrs, on the curtain.  Her hair was brushed severely back from her candid forehead, and though her figure had grown somewhat heavier and less girlish in line, she still wore her plain black dress and white collar with an incomparable distinction.  Through all the hardship and suffering of the last three years she had kept her look of bright intelligence, of radiant energy.  In dress and manner she was the successful woman of business, but she was the woman of business with something added.  Though she spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, her voice had a vibrating quality; though she wore only the plainest clothes, her grace, her good-breeding, her indefinable charm, softened the severity.

“Mrs. Pletheridge is uncertain about this gown,” explained Madame, “but I tell her that it suits her to perfection, as well as if it had been designed for her by Worth.  Do you not agree with me, Mrs. Carr?  You have, as I said to her, the true eye of the artist.”

Without changing her position or moving a step into the room, Gabriella attentively regarded the gown and the wearer.  From the mirror Mrs. Pletheridge stared back at her ill-humouredly, with a spiteful gleam in her small black eyes between the carefully darkened lids.

“I can’t imagine what is the matter with it,” she reiterated, as if she were repeating a sad refrain, and her manner was as insolent as Miss Murphy’s had been to the casual customer.

For an instant Gabriella returned her look with the steady gaze of one who, having achieved the full courage of living, has attained also a calm insensibility to the shafts of arrogance.  Three years ago she would have flinched before Mrs. Pletheridge’s disdain, but in those three years she had passed beyond the variegated tissue of appearances to the bare structure of life—­she had worked and wept and starved and suffered—­and to-day her soul was invulnerable against even more destructive weapons than the contempt of a plutocrat.  Perhaps, too, though she assured herself that she was without snobbishness, there was a secret satisfaction in the knowledge that one of her ancestors had been a general under Washington while the early Pletheridges were planting potatoes in a peasant’s patch in Ireland.  Her dignity was more assured than Madame’s; for she was perfectly aware of a fact to which Madame was blind, and this was, that, in spite of her position in the social columns of the newspapers and her multitudinous possessions, Mrs. Pletheridge was not, and could never be, a lady.  While Gabriella stood there these thoughts flashed recklessly through her mind; yet she answered Madame’s question as frankly and honestly as if the woman they were staring at with such intentness had not been the tragic vulgarian she was.

“I think the gown doesn’t suit her at all,” she said quietly to Madame, who made a horrified face at her over the sumptuous shoulder of Mrs. Pletheridge.  “There is too much of it, too much billowy lace everywhere.”  She did not add that the coral and silver brocade gave Mrs. Pletheridge a curious resemblance to an overblown prize hollyhock.