“Look here, Gabriella, I hope you don’t bear me any malice,” Florrie burst out solicitously, for her frankness, like her sensuality, was elemental in its audacity.  “You oughtn’t to if you know what I saved you from,” she proceeded convincingly.  “Anyway, we were chums long before either of us ever thought about a man, and I didn’t really do you a bit of harm.  It wasn’t as if you cared about George, was it?”

“No, it wasn’t as if I’d cared about him.”  Gabriella was answering the appeal as truthfully as if Florrie had been the most excellent of her sex.  “You didn’t harm me in any way—­not in any way,” she repeated with firmness.

“That’s just the way I told mother you’d look at it.  I knew you were always so broad-minded even as a girl.  Then there isn’t any reason we shouldn’t be friends just as we used to be.”

Gabriella shook her head, polite but implacable in her refusal.  “It isn’t what you did to me, Florrie,” she answered gently, “it’s what you are that I can’t forgive.  I can imagine that a good woman might do almost anything—­might even run off with another woman’s husband, but you aren’t good.  You wouldn’t be good if you’d spent your life in a convent.”

A quick flush—­the flush of temper—­stained the pearly whiteness of Florrie’s skin.  “Oh, of course, if you don’t want to,” she retorted, a little shrilly, though she tried to subdue her rebellious voice to the pitch of Fifth Avenue.  “I only thought that being a working woman, you wouldn’t have so very many friends, and you might get lonely.  I had seats at the opera every night last winter, and time and again I’d have been glad to have given them to you.  Then, too, I might have been able to bring you some custom.  I know any number of rich women who don’t think anything of paying a thousand dollars for a dress—­”

Her insolence was so evidently the result of anger that Gabriella, without interrupting the flow, waited courteously until she paused.

“No, you cannot do anything for me, Florrie.”  Though Gabriella’s voice was crisp and firm, her face looked suddenly older, and little lines, stamped by weariness and regret, appeared at the corners of her still brilliant eyes.  “I don’t wish you any harm,” she went on more softly.  “If you were in trouble I’d do what I could for you, but somehow I don’t seem able to forgive you for being what you are.  Would you like to look at anything else?” she inquired in her professional tone.  “Miss Murphy is waiting to show you some hats.”

Her cheeks were burning when she passed out of the ivory and gold door, saluted deferentially by the attendant in livery.  “The effrontery!” she thought, “the barefaced effrontery!” and then, as her eyes fell on Florrie’s trim little electric coupé beside the curb, she exclaimed mentally, recalling George’s animated perplexity about the pearl necklace, “I wonder how in the world she does it?”