recious platinum. So if you except
Miss Jevne's changeless colour, her artificial smile, her glittering
hair and her undulating head-of-the-department walk, you can see that
everything about Miss Jevne was as real as money can make one.

Miss Jevne, when she deigned to notice Ray Willets at all, called her
"girl," thus: "Girl, get down one of those Number Seventeens for
me--with the pink ribbons." Ray did not resent the tone. She thought
about Miss Jevne as she worked. She thought about her at night when she
was washing and ironing her other shirtwaist for next day's wear. In the
Halsted Street Bazaar the girls had been on terms of dreadful intimacy
with those affairs in each other's lives which popularly are supposed to
be private knowledge. They knew the sum which each earned per week; how
much they turned in to help swell the family coffers and how much they
were allowed to keep for their own use. They knew each time a girl spent
a quarter for a cheap sailor collar or a pair of near-silk stockings.
Ray Willets, who wanted passionately to be different, whose hands so
loved the touch of the lacy, silky garments that made up the lingerie
and negligee departments, recognised the perfection of Miss Jevne's
faultless realness--recognised it, appreciated it, envied it. It worried
her too. How did she do it? How did one go about attaining the same
degree of realness?

Meanwhile she worked. She learned quickly. She took care always to be
cheerful, interested, polite. After a short week's handling of lacy
silken garments she ceased to feel a shock when she saw Miss Jevne
displaying a _robe-de-nuit_ made up of white cloud and sea-foam and
languidly assuring the customer that of course it wasn't to be expected
that you could get a fine handmade lace at that price--only
twenty-seven-fifty. Now if she cared to look at something really
fine--made entirely by hand--why--

The end of the first ten days found so much knowledge crammed into Ray
Willets' clever, ambitious little head that the pink of her cheeks had
deepened to carmine, as a child grows flushed and too bright-eyed when
overstimulated and overtired.

Miss Myrtle, the store beauty, strolled up to Ray, who was straightening
a pile of corset covers and _brassieres_. Miss Myrtle was the store's
star cloak-and-suit model. Tall, svelte, graceful, lovely in line and
contour, she was remarkably like one of those exquisite imbeciles that
Rossetti used to love to paint. Hers we