life she missed the spontaneity, the ready laughter, the naturalness of her own. She saw morose, worried faces. Here there was little of that softness of speech to which she was accustomed. Here there was an obsession with material things that crowded out the naturalness that made life for her tolerable. I’ve made my bed now, she reflected, and there’s nothing for me to do except lie in it. …
She did not experience the difficulty in securing employment that she had feared. There had been vague rumblings of discord and war in Europe, but all that seemed very far away, too distant ever to affect America. The mad rush that ushered in Easter and spring, the return like homing pigeons of the wealthy from Palm Beach, the momentary pause in New York before taking wing again for Europe or the mountains or the seashore, taxed to the limit the shops of the modistes and milliners, the makers of boots and gowns and habiliments of a thousand kinds for those vaguely classed as “society.”
Deft fingers flew, the needles of sewing-machines flashed in and out like pelting raindrops of silver in a summer shower. Yards and bolts and tons of filmy silks and crêpes de Chine and organdie turned overnight into dainty dresses. A long, nastily cold winter was gasping its last long breath and little wisps of softer breezes fanned the cheeks of the scurrying throngs, telling them spring was near.
The unforeseen demand for new and more clothes brought with it the need of workers. Mimi, having set her face on the new life she had chosen, determined she would start at the smartest places in seeking employment and work gradually downwards until she had gained what she wished. She knew the names and addresses of the most exclusive modistes, the shops where gowns and frocks were purveyed to the smartest-dressed women of New York and Oshkosh and Sioux City. To her surprised delight she was successful at the first place to which she applied—at Francine’s—known wherever the best women’s clothes were known.