As she moved toward her, without noticing the friendly hand that Florrie held out, Gabriella was conscious of an ironical inclination to laugh.  Though she felt no bitter personal resentment against Florrie—­for, after all, Florrie had not been able to hurt her—­there struggled in her bosom an indignation more profound, more moving, than any merely personal emotion could be.  Her resentment was directed not against Florrie, but against some abstract destiny which had permitted Florrie to have her way without paying the price.  For on the pinnacle of a destructive career, unsinged by the conflagration she had so carelessly started, Florrie was poised securely, crowned, triumphant, rejoicing.  On her dazzling height, successful and happy, she was as far removed as one could imaginably be from the repentant Magdalen of tradition.  The memory of George’s face as it looked in death, floated before the austere mental vision of Gabriella, and she reflected grimly that tradition was not always the mirror of life.  For in this one case at least, the man, not the woman, had been the victim of natural law, and Florrie, fool though she was, had shown herself at the hour of requital to be stronger than fate.  By that instinctive wisdom, which is so much older, so much truer than civilization, she had triumphed over the ordination of life.  In refusing to suffer she had blunted every weapon with which Nature might have punished her in the end.  Not by virtue, since she had none, but by pure insensibility, she had escaped the wages of sin.  She was a sensualist whose sensuality, hard, metallic, glittering, encased her like armour.

At Gabriella’s approach Miss Murphy fluttered off cooingly in the direction of a fresh customer, and only the festively garlanded French mirror witnessed the meeting of the two who had been schoolgirls together.  Swift as an arrow there shot through Gabriella’s mind, “I wonder what Ben O’Hara would think of her?” Then she checked the dangerous flight of her fancy, for she remembered that O’Hara’s thoughts about anything no longer concerned her.

“Are you buying a hat?” inquired Florrie curiously.

“No, I belong here.  I am Madame Dinard.”

“You don’t mean it!  I never should have believed it!  The idea of your being a dressmaker.  That’s why you look so smart, I suppose.  You’re the smartest thing I’ve seen anywhere, but you look older, Gabriella.”

“Well, you don’t.”  It was perfectly true.  Except for the gaudy decorations and the twanging accents of the arrogant young women, Gabriella might have imagined herself in the last century atmosphere of Broad Street in the middle ’nineties.

“I must tell you about the things I use.”  Florrie was always generous.  “But, I declare if I’d known this place was yours, I’d have got my hats here ages ago.  Of course I knew it was dreadfully swell, but I thought the prices were beyond anything.”

“They are,” responded Gabriella with business-like brevity, while she glanced about for the flitting Miss Murphy.