draping folds of satin on a wire figure, with a quite
blissful expression of countenance. I couldn't help thinking that the
years when Lena literally hadn't enough clothes to cover herself might
have something to do with her untiring interest in dressing the human
figure. Her clients said that Lena 'had style,' and overlooked her
habitual inaccuracies. She never, I discovered, finished anything by the
time she had promised, and she frequently spent more money on materials
than her customer had authorized. Once, when I arrived at six o'clock,
Lena was ushering out a fidgety mother and her awkward, overgrown
daughter. The woman detained Lena at the door to say apologetically:

'You'll try to keep it under fifty for me, won't you, Miss Lingard? You
see, she's really too young to come to an expensive dressmaker, but I
knew you could do more with her than anybody else.'

'Oh, that will be all right, Mrs. Herron. I think we'll manage to get a
good effect,' Lena replied blandly.

I thought her manner with her customers very good, and wondered where
she had learned such self-possession.

Sometimes after my morning classes were over, I used to encounter Lena
downtown, in her velvet suit and a little black hat, with a veil tied
smoothly over her face, looking as fresh as the spring morning. Maybe
she would be carrying home a bunch of jonquils or a hyacinth plant. When
we passed a candy store her footsteps would hesitate and linger. 'Don't
let me go in,' she would murmur. 'Get me by if you can.' She was very
fond of sweets, and was afraid of growing too plump.

We had delightful Sunday breakfasts together at Lena's. At the back of
her long work-room was a bay-window, large enough to hold a box-couch
and a reading-table. We breakfasted in this recess, after drawing the
curtains that shut out the long room, with cutting-tables and wire women
and sheet-draped garments on the walls. The sunlight poured in, making
everything on the table shine and glitter and the flame of the alcohol
lamp disappear altogether. Lena's curly black water-spaniel, Prince,
breakfasted with us. He sat beside her on the couch and behaved very
well until the Polish violin-teacher across the hall began to practise,
when Prince would growl and sniff the air with disgust. Lena's landlord,
old Colonel Raleigh, had given her the dog, and at first she was not at
all pleased. She had spent too much of her life taking care of animals
to have much sentiment about t