Her morning’s work was unusually trying, and at one o’clock, when she put on her hat before going out to lunch, she asked herself dejectedly:  “What can be the matter with me?  Before I go home I’ll take a taxicab and drive up Riverside for an hour.  If only the children were here, I should not feel so depressed.”  She remembered regretfully that Archibald and Fanny would be away all summer; and then from thinking of her children, she passed by almost insensible degrees of despondency to meditating pensively about Arthur Peyton.  What a wreck, what an inconceivably stupid wreck she had made of her happiness!

As she entered the outer showroom on her way to the street, she heard the voice of Miss Murphy attuned to a cooing pitch, and glancing around a little, painted cabinet, filled with useless ornaments, which stood in the centre of the floor, she beheld a dazzling head of reddish gold before one of the elaborately decorated French mirrors.  While she advanced the red-gold waves, worn with extreme flatness over a forehead of pearly whiteness, were submerged for a minute in the smallest and roundest hat in the shop, and from a fashionable figure, reminding her vaguely of an ambulatory dressmaker’s model, there issued a high, fluting note of delighted ejaculation.

“This is just exactly what I’ve been looking all over New York for!  Now, isn’t it too funny for anything that I should have found it right here the very minute I came in?” As Gabriella’s face flashed back from the mirror the fashionable figure sprang suddenly to life, and the voice, still fluting delightedly, exclaimed: 

“Why, Gabriella!  Where on earth did you come from?”

For a minute sheer amazement kept Gabriella clinging helplessly to the ridiculous cabinet, from the top of which an artificial rose-bush seemed to shower artificial pink petals down on her head.  Then, recovering herself, with a sharp effort of will, she went forward a few steps beyond the shelter of the cabinet, and said composedly: 

“How do you do, Florrie?  I did not recognize you at first.”

For it was Florrie herself, Florrie in the flesh, Florrie, glowing, sparkling, prosperous, victorious.  Her figure, conforming to the latest mode, had lost its pinched protuberances, and was long, slender, sinuous in its perfection of line.  Beneath the small round hat, her hair, glossy with brilliantine, was like melted gold in the large loose waves which revealed the rosy tips of her ears.  She was thirty-nine, and she looked scarcely a day over twenty-five.  The peach-blossom texture of her skin was as unlined by care or pain as if she had spent the last ten years immured in a convent; for in this case, at least, Gabriella realized while she looked at her, the retribution which awaits upon sinners had been tardy in its fulfilment.