“Now, to settle this argument,” said Dan, with his ready, cheerful smile, “let me make a proposition.  As I can’t take both of you up to Tiffany’s and do the right thing, what do you say to a little vaudeville?  I’ve got the rickets.  How about looking at stage diamonds since we can’t shake hands with the real sparklers?”

The faithful squire took his place close to the curb; Lou next, a little peacocky in her bright and pretty clothes; Nancy on the inside, slender, and soberly clothed as the sparrow, but with the true Van Alstyne Fisher walk—­thus they set out for their evening’s moderate diversion.

I do not suppose that many look upon a great department store as an educational institution.  But the one in which Nancy worked was something like that to her.  She was surrounded by beautiful things that breathed of taste and refinement.  If you live in an atmosphere of luxury, luxury is yours whether your money pays for it, or another’s.

The people she served were mostly women whose dress, manners, and position in the social world were quoted as criterions.  From them Nancy began to take toll—­the best from each according to her view.

From one she would copy and practice a gesture, from another an eloquent lifting of an eyebrow, from others, a manner of walking, of carrying a purse, of smiling, of greeting a friend, of addressing “inferiors in station.”  From her best beloved model, Mrs. Van Alstyne Fisher, she made requisition for that excellent thing, a soft, low voice as clear as silver and as perfect in articulation as the notes of a thrush.  Suffused in the aura of this high social refinement and good breeding, it was impossible for her to escape a deeper effect of it.  As good habits are said to be better than good principles, so, perhaps, good manners are better than good habits.  The teachings of your parents may not keep alive your New England conscience; but if you sit on a straight-back chair and repeat the words “prisms and pilgrims” forty times the devil will flee from you.  And when Nancy spoke in the Van Alstyne Fisher tones she felt the thrill of noblesse oblige to her very bones.

There was another source of learning in the great departmental school.  Whenever you see three or four shop-girls gather in a bunch and jingle their wire bracelets as an accompaniment to apparently frivolous conversation, do not think that they are there for the purpose of criticizing the way Ethel does her back hair.  The meeting may lack the dignity of the deliberative bodies of man; but it has all the importance of the occasion on which Eve and her first daughter first put their heads together to make Adam understand his proper place in the household.  It is Woman’s Conference for Common Defense and Exchange of Strategical Theories of Attack and Repulse upon and against the World, which is a Stage, and Man, its Audience who Persists in Throwing Bouquets Thereupon.  Woman, the most helpless of the young of any animal—­with the fawn’s grace but without its fleetness; with the bird’s beauty but without its power of flight; with the honey-bee’s burden of sweetness but without its—­Oh, let’s drop that simile—­some of us may have been stung.