There were many things for her to learn, and the lessons of that first day and night stretched through the winter and well into the beginning of spring.  Accompanying Mrs. Fowler on her busy rounds, she discovered that here also, as in the house in Hill Street, the chief end of life was to keep up an appearance; here also the supreme effort, the best energies, were devoted to a sham—­to a thing which had no actual existence.  Though Mrs. Fowler was rich beside Mrs. Carr, Gabriella soon found out that she was not nearly so rich as her neighbours were, not nearly so rich as her position in society exacted that she should be.  She was still not rich enough to be spared the sordid, nerve-racking effort to make two ends meet without a visible break.  Her small economies, to Gabriella’s surprise, were as rigid as Mrs. Carr’s; and though she lived in surroundings which appeared luxurious to the girl, there was almost as little ready money to spend as there had been in Mrs. Carr’s household.  Bills were made recklessly, and dinner parties were given at regular intervals; for Mrs. Fowler, who denied herself a hundred small comforts of living, who gave up cream in her coffee and bought her butter from a grocer below Washington Square, took quite as a matter of course the fact that she must, as she put it, “pay off social scores.”  Though they ate the simplest food in the market for six days of the week, on the seventh, hothouse flowers bloomed profusely in the lower rooms and champagne flowed abundantly into the delicate Venetian glasses on the round table.  To be sure, Mrs. Fowler’s gown may have been two seasons old, but it was covered with rare laces, which she had picked up during her summers abroad; and her pearls—­the string was short, but really good, for she had matched it in Paris—­shone, rich and costly, around her still beautiful neck.  After one of these dinners the family lived on scraps and looked at fading flowers for days, while Mrs. Fowler, with the air of one who has done her duty, sat upstairs before the little French writing-desk in her room, and patiently added accounts from morning till night.  A strained look would come into her plump, firm face, three little wrinkles would appear between her eyebrows, and her blue eyes, circled by faint shadows, would grow dark and anxious.  Then, when at last the accounts were finished and the unpaid bills laid away in a pigeonhole, she would remark with animation: 

“I don’t see how on earth I am ever to pay all these bills,” and, after changing her dress, set out to bring her butcher or her grocer to reason.  On one of these days she took Gabriella (they went in the stage because she had given up her carriage) on a hunt for bargains in underwear, and, to the girl’s astonishment, her mother-in-law, who presented so opulent an appearance on the surface, purchased for herself a supply of cheap and badly made chemises and nightgowns.  As she grew to know Mrs. Fowler better, she found that the expenditures