An hour later, sitting beside an Italian labourer in an elevated train, she tried hard to keep her mind on the day’s work and on the morning paper, which she held open before her—­for in adopting a business life she had adopted instinctively a man’s businesslike habits.  A subtle distinction divided her from the over-dressed shopgirls around her as completely as her sex separated her from the portly masculine breadwinner in the opposite seat.  Her tailored suit of black serge, with its immaculate white collar and cuffs, had an air of charming simplicity, and the cameolike outline of her features against the luminous background of the window-pane was the aristocratic racial outline of the Carrs.  In the whirlpool of modern business she still preserved the finer attributes which Nature had bred in her race.  The bitter sweetness of the mother’s inheritance, grafted on the hardy stock of the Carr character, had flavoured without weakening the daughter’s spirit, and, though few of the men in the train glanced in the direction of Gabriella, the few who noticed her in her corner surmised by intuition that she possessed not only the manner, but the heart of a lady.  She was not particularly handsome, not particularly young, and her charm was scarcely the kind to flash like a lantern before the eye of the beholder.  To the portly breadwinner she was probably a nice-looking American business woman, nothing more; to the Italian labourer she was, doubtless, a lady with a pleasant face, who would be polite if you asked her a question; and to the other passengers she must have appeared merely a woman reading her newspaper on her way down to work.  Her primal qualities of force, restraint, and capability were the last things these superficial observers would have thought of; and yet it was by these qualities that she must succeed or fail in her struggle for life.

When she reached Dinard’s she found Miss Smith, the only woman in Madame’s employ who was ever punctual, ill-humouredly poking the spring hats out of the cases.  Miss Smith, who excelled in the cardinal virtues, manifested at times a few of those minor frailties by which the cardinal virtues are not infrequently attended.  Her one pronounced fault was a bad temper, and on this particular morning that fault was conspicuous.  As she carried the hats from the cases to the window, which she was decorating with the festive millinery of the spring, she looked as if she were resisting an impulse to throw Madame’s choicest confections at the jovial figure of the traffic policeman.  Gabriella, who was used to what she called the “peculiarities” of the forewoman, said “good morning” with her bright amiability, and hurried back to the dim regions where she changed from her street suit to the picturesque French gown which she wore in the showroom.  When she came out again Miss Smith had finished ornamenting the white pegs in the window, and was vigorously upbraiding a messenger boy who had delivered a parcel at the wrong door.