“It’s all because Carlie lives in the row, and by next year, after we’ve had all the trouble of moving, she’ll find another bosom friend and want to go to Park Avenue.”

“It’s a real comfortable sort of house, more like Richmond than New York, and I reckon we could get flowers to grow there just about as well as they did in Hill Street.”

“I don’t like having those O’Haras on the lower floor.  If they are loud and common, it might be very disagreeable.”

“There ain’t but one, a man, and he’s hardly ever there, the caretaker’s wife told me.  She said he was almost always in the West, and anyway his lease is up next year, and he thinks he’ll give up his rooms.  She says he has made piles of money in mines somewhere out West, and he only keeps those rooms because they used to belong to a man who picked him out of the street when he was a little boy selling newspapers.  That caretaker’s wife seems to be a mighty kind-hearted creature, but she talks as if she was never goin’ to stop.”

“I think I could afford to take an apartment in Park Avenue,” returned Gabriella, dismissing the name of O’Hara; “but, of course, I want to save as much as I can in order to invest in the business.  If it wasn’t for that, I could stop scraping and pinching.  I can’t bear, though, to think of leaving nothing for the children when I die.”

“Go away from here, honey.  The idea of your talkin’ about dyin’!  You look healthier than you ever did in your life, only you’re gettin’ that set look again about your mouth.”

“I wonder if I’m growing hard,” said Gabriella, stopping to glance in the mirror.  “I suppose that’s the problem of life for the working woman—­not to grow hard.”  In some ways, she realized, Miss Polly was right.  She was a handsome woman, as Madame occasionally informed her; but she was no longer shrinking, she was no longer alluringly feminine.  To dress smartly for Dinard’s was a part of her work, and she had grown quite indifferent to having men turn and stare after her in the street or when she entered a restaurant.  But the men who stared never spoke to her as they did to Fanny when she was alone.  They regarded her admiringly, but she aroused neither disrespect nor the protective instinct in their minds.  Only when she smiled her face grew as young as her eyes, and with the powdering of silver on her hair, gave her a look of radiance and charm; but at other times, when she was grave or preoccupied with the management of Dinard’s, the “set look” that Miss Polly dreaded hardened her mouth.

“I wish you could go easier now for a while,” resumed the little seamstress, after a pause which she had filled with vague speculations about Gabriella’s sentimental prospects.  “I just hate like anything to see you wearing yourself out.  Of course I’d like you to own part of the business, and I can’t help thinkin’ that the judge could get you the money as easy as not.  It ain’t as if you couldn’t pay him the interest regular, is it?” she pursued with the financial helplessness of a woman who has never thought in terms of figures.  “You couldn’t be doin’ any better, could you?  There ain’t anybody can run the business as well as you do, I don’t care who ’tis.”