An hour or so later, when Florrie and her mother had fluttered volubly downstairs, and the exhausted assistants were putting the hats away before closing the cases, Gabriella went into the dressing-room, where Miss Nash, a stout, pleasant-looking girl, was sitting in a broken chair, with her shoes off, her blue serge skirt rolled back from her knees, and her head bowed, over her crossed arms, on the window-sill.

At Gabriella’s entrance she glanced up, and remarked cheerfully:  “My feet were killing me.  I just had to take off my shoes.”

“They do get dreadfully tired,” assented Gabriella in the tone of sympathetic intimacy she had caught from the other girls.

Her naturally friendly spirit had refused to “hold aloof” from her companions, as her mother had begged her to do, and at the end of three months she had learned things about most of them which interested her profoundly.  One supported an invalid father, another had a family of six little brothers and sisters to care for, and still another had lost her lover through a railroad accident only two days before her marriage.  Several of them were extravagantly loud, one or two were inclined to be vulgar; but the others were quite as refined and gentle as the girls with whom she had grown up, and what impressed her about them all was their courageous and yet essentially light-hearted Southern spirit.  To her surprise, she found an utter absence of jealousy among them.  The elder women were invariably kind and helpful, and though she liked the girls, she soon discovered in herself a growing feeling of respect for these older women.  They represented a different type, for the hardness she noticed in some of the younger girls was entirely lacking in the women of Miss Lancaster’s generation.  Many of them even her mother would have called well born, and one and all, they were almost painfully ladylike.  With their thin, erect figures, their wan, colourless faces, their graying hair, and their sweet Southern voices, they imparted a delicate social air to the shop.

Usually Gabriella stopped to talk to the girls who crowded in from the workroom, brushing shreds of silk or ribbon from their skirts, but to-day her mind wandered while she answered Miss Nash, and when, a minute later, Miss Lancaster spoke to her on her way out, and asked her to match the flowers for Florrie’s hat, she was obliged to make an effort before she could recall her roving attention.  She was thinking not of Florrie’s hat, but of Mrs. Spencer’s words, “He has come back because he heard that your engagement was broken.”  And at the first insurgent rise of emotion, she ceased to be the business woman and became merely an imaginative girl, dreaming of love.

“They aren’t quite the right shade, are they?” she asked with an uncertainty which was tactful rather than sincere, “or, perhaps, the ribbon might be darker?”

Her eyes questioned Miss Lancaster, who moved a step nearer the window as she held the bolt of ribbon toward the daylight.