the
palette.

The textiles once chosen, Camille is called to "take measures" and
arrange for the fittings.

"And now, one question," says Mademoiselle, "Is your stage level, or
does it slope towards the back? Very well, that is all."

When the singer arrives for her first trying-on, the fitting room is
filled with lengths of material, and Mademoiselle herself stands in the
midst, brandishing a huge pair of shears. She throws a length of silk
over one of your shoulders, puts in two pins, and bunching the material
in her left hand, gives a slash with the scissors in her right, with a
recklessness that makes you shudder. A pull here, a fold there, two more
pins--and the stuff hangs as almost no one else can make it hang,
accentuating a good figure and disguising a poor one.

Occasionally in filling a regular order she will stumble upon an unusual
effect. One day they were making Moyen-Age sleeves for the dress of a
well-known singer whom Mlle. Muelle has gowned for years, but who has
never been included in the list of her special favourites. The sleeve
was of slashed silvery grey, lined with cerise, the lining showing on
the edges. She picked up a bit of cloth of silver and pulled it through
the slashes. The effect charmed her.

"_Tenez!_" she said, "That is too good for her. We'll keep that for La
Belle Geraldine."

"La Belle Geraldine," as Miss Farrar is known in Paris, is one of
Muelle's most constant patrons. Ever since her Berlin days she has been
costumed by the Maison Muelle, and she stands very high in the list of
Mademoiselle's favourites.

The outer room may contain the photographs of celebrities great and
small, but in the inner room there are just two--a portrait of Miss
Farrar as _Elizabeth_ and one of myself as _Carmen_.

Opening off the main reception and fitting rooms are others lined with
_armoires_ and stacks of boxes running to the ceiling. Then come the
rooms for cutting and sewing, and the embroidery rooms. Muelle uses
quantities of solid embroidery and _applique_ work, where other
costumers are content with stenciling and gilding. She has the secret of
a metal thread that does not tarnish. Her idea is that the use of
first-class materials, good silks and satins, real velvets is a
necessity in these days of electric lighting, which is as revealing as
sunlight; that the substitution of imitation fabrics went out with the
use of gas in the theatre, and that the superior wearing qualities alone