matching the framework of the long table with marble top on which rested sketchbooks of designs and models. The tiny stage fitted with footlights and drops, its flooring of squares of black and white marble, glowed with impressive and anticipatory dignity. Daintily clad and perfumed and manicured ladies lolled at ease upon divans or in straight-backed chairs, according to tastes and sizes, while mannequins pirouetted and posed and paraded around and across the stage. Every detail had been minutely scrutinized, every bit of unobtrusive allure had been utilized to induce the dawdling audience to the point of conviction and purchase. Instinctively one lowered one’s voice—the temple must not be profaned. One bought, too, for few were strong enough to resist the feeling that all this had been designed and executed solely for one’s own private delectation, and certainly one could not be guilty of base ingratitude through failure to render homage by ordering one or more of the creations displayed. …
But all this magnificence was terra incognita to Mimi for many, many months after she had begun work as a finisher at Francine’s. There were four other floors occupied by workrooms and tailoring-rooms and lunchroom. There was the basement used as an office and stockroom and shipping-room. In the upper stories the finishers and drapers and drapers’ assistants and fitters and clerks and stenographers and tailors moved and had their being. These were never seen by customers, nor were the first two floors ever seen by any employees save the sales persons, except when viewed in hasty peeps after hours. These workers entered through rear or side doors, ascended to their work tables by rear elevators, saw nothing of the pageant enacted daily in the same building.
Timidly Mimi told the imposing and businesslike fitter her qualifications as a wielder of the needle and thimble. In these less dignified purlieus there was no need of lowered voices, and the rush of work in the pre-Easter season had shortened tempers and sharpened tongues. Mimi would have fled madly from the scene had not she so