."

"The lacy--"

Ray, very red-cheeked, made the plunge. "The--the lawnjeree, you know.
The things with ribbon and handwork and yards and yards of real lace.
I've seen 'em in the glass case in the French Room. Seventy-nine dollars
marked down from one hundred."

The superintendent scribbled on a card. "Show this Monday morning. Miss
Jevne is the head of your department. You'll spend two hours a day in
the store school of instruction for clerks. Here, you're forgetting your
glove."

The grey look had settled down on him again as he reached out to press
the desk button. Ray Willets passed out at the door opposite the one
through which Rachel Wiletzky had entered.

Some one in the department nick-named her Chubbs before she had spent
half a day in the underwear and imported lingerie. At the store school
she listened and learned. She learned how important were things of which
Halsted Street took no cognisance. She learned to make out a sale slip
as complicated as an engineering blueprint. She learned that a clerk
must develop suavity and patience in the same degree as a customer waxes
waspish and insulting, and that the spectrum's colours do not exist in
the costume of the girl-behind-the-counter. For her there are only black
and white. These things she learned and many more, and remembered them,
for behind the rosy cheeks and the terrier-bright eyes burned the
indomitable desire to get on. And the finished embodiment of all of Ray
Willets' desires and ambitions was daily before her eyes in the presence
of Miss Jevne, head of the lingerie and negligees.

Of Miss Jevne it might be said that she was real where Ray was
artificial, and artificial where Ray was real. Everything that Miss
Jevne wore was real. She was as modish as Ray was shabby, as slim as Ray
was stocky, as artificially tinted and tinctured as Ray was naturally
rosy-cheeked and buxom. It takes real money to buy clothes as real as
those worn by Miss Jevne. The soft charmeuse in her graceful gown was
real and miraculously draped. The cobweb-lace collar that so delicately
traced its pattern against the black background of her gown was real. So
was the ripple of lace that cascaded down the front of her blouse. The
straight, correct, hideously modern lines of her figure bespoke a real
eighteen-dollar corset. Realest of all, there reposed on Miss Jevne's
bosom a bar pin of platinum and diamonds--very real diamonds set in a
severely plain but very real bar of p