“I thought I saw her when I came in,” observed Mrs. Spencer, craning her handsome neck, which was running to fat, in the direction of the trimming room.  “Florrie, just turn your head after a minute and look at the hat Patty Carrington is buying—­pea green, and it makes her face look like a walnut.  She hasn’t the faintest idea how to dress.  Do you think I ought to speak to her about it?”

“No, let her alone,” replied Florrie impatiently.  “Is this any better than the Leghorn?”

“Well, I must say I don’t think there is much style about it, though, of course, with your hair, you can carry off anything.  Isn’t it odd how exactly she inherited my hair, Miss Lancaster?  I remember her father used to say that he would have fallen in love with a gatepost if it had had golden-red hair.”

Miss Lancaster, a thin, erect woman of fifty, with impassive features, and iron-gray hair that looked as if it were rolled over wood, glanced resignedly from Mrs. Spencer’s orange-coloured crimps to the imprisoned sunlight in Florrie’s hair.

“I’d know you were mother and daughter anywhere,” she remarked in the noncommittal manner she had acquired in thirty years of independence; “and she is going to have your beautiful figure, too, Mrs. Spencer.”

“Well, I reckon I’ll lose my figure now that I’ve stopped dieting,” remarked the lively lady, casting an appreciative glance in the mirror.  “Florrie tells me I wear my sleeves too large, but I think they make me look smaller.”

“They are wearing them very large in Paris,” replied Miss Lancaster, as if she were reciting a verse out of a catalogue.  She had, as she sometimes found occasion to remark, been “born tired,” and this temperamental weariness showed now in her handsome face, so wrinkled and dark around her bravely smiling eyes.  Where she came from, or how she spent her time between the hour she left the shop and the hour she returned to it, the two women knew as little as they knew the intimate personal history of the Leghorn hat on the peg by the mirror.  Beyond the fact that she played the part of a sympathetic chorus, they were without curiosity about her life.  Their own personalities absorbed them, and for the time at least appeared to absorb Miss Lancaster.

“I like the Leghorn hat,” said Florrie decisively, as she tried it on for the third time, “but I’ll wait till I ask Gabriella’s opinion.”

“I hope she’s getting on well here,” said Mrs. Spencer, who found it impossible to concentrate on Florrie’s hat.  “Don’t you think it was very brave of her to go to work, Miss Lancaster?”

“I understood that she was obliged to,” rejoined Miss Lancaster, with the weary amiability of her professional manner.

“She might have married, I happen to know that,” returned Mrs. Spencer.  “Arthur Peyton has been in love with her ever since she was a child, and there was a young man from New York last winter who seemed crazy about her.  Florrie, don’t you think George Fowler was just crazy about Gabriella?”