and yellow, and she's kept part of her
looks, though not near as much of them as she thinks. She was a
beautiful girl at twenty, I'll say that for her. None of these girls now
compares with her. But she was a little too sure of herself and took too
long deciding among the young men of this town, until all at once, she
found that nobody wanted her. She's been trying ever since to show she
doesn't care; and she pesters the life out of me twice a year trying to
fit her out with a hat. I won't let her go around the streets looking
like a giddy young fool, and that's what she's determined to do. So, if
you can suit her _and_ me, you will be doing pretty well."

The description made a picture for Rose. She saw the faded pathetic
prettiness of the woman who'd looked too long and had been trying to
pretend for the last fifteen years or so that she didn't care. And the
picture in her mind's eye was surmounted by a hat; a hat that conceded
some of the years Miss Gibbons had insisted on, and that her client was
unwilling to acknowledge, and yet retained a sort of jauntiness.

She didn't know whether she could execute the thing she saw or not, out
of the stock of materials at her disposal. But it hadn't cost her a
thought or an effort to see the hat.

"All right," she said after a bit. "I'll see what I can do. If you'll
show me where the things are ..."

It was a much humbler sort of job, of course, designing a hat for a
middle-aged village spinster, than making those dozen gowns for
Goldsmith and Block had been. But this consideration never occurred to
her. She found, and was not even amazed to find, the same thrill of
exhilaration in conquering the small problem, that she had found in the
larger one. She worked with the same swift unconscious economy of labor
and materials.

At the end of two hours, she presented the result of her labors for the
milliner's approval.

Miss Gibbons surveyed it with a smile of ironic appreciation.

"It isn't what I'd call a real finished job," she commented after a
minute inspection of some of the details of Rose's sewing. "I wouldn't
trust it in a high wind not to scatter all the way from here to the
Presbyterian church. But it will certainly suit Agatha Stebbins."

She looked at it a while longer. "And I don't know," she concluded a
little reluctantly, "as it'll look so all-mighty foolish on her, either.
Will ten dollars a week suit you to begin on?"

"Yes," said Rose, "that will suit me