While I was thus bobbing up and down upon the restless waters of my profession, my strange “old lady,” who had grown to be my friend, was sitting “like a gray, old Fate, toiling, toiling, weaving” the fairy-like stitches that made whole again the torn or injured among rare and precious laces. Her knowledge of them was wonderful, her love for them almost tender. She would shake her head and croon over them, when they were, in her words, “badly hurt.” The day she came nearest to loving me was the day I said I thought laces were the poetry of a woman’s wardrobe. “Aye, aye,” she answered, “that’s a good word and well said, girl Clara. It’s strange that, without teaching or information, your keen instinct guides you to the _real_ beauties of life as surely as the sense of smell guides a young hound on the trail. There’s nothing made by the hand of poverty that is so beautiful as lace; so delicate yet so strong. Ah! girl Clara, some day, may you see a bit of Venetian ‘point,’ ‘round point,’ but if you do, you’ll smash a commandment, mark my words!” Laces were sent to her from distant cities, and the package I had caught up from under the horses’ feet came, as did many others, from the then greatest merchant of New York. She had received much work from the South, but the war deprived her of that. So she went on cutting her expenses down to meet her earnings, starving quite slowly and making her moan to no man. One day I paid a long-promised, much-dreaded visit to a young friend of mine. We had made our first appearance in the ballet together, the same night, the same play, and she was still in the ballet. She was the young person who gave me the decorated fly-trap for a Christmas gift. Somehow that remarkable selection of a gift always seems to have had something to do with her remaining so many years the chief ornament of that ballet. I had gone with her from rehearsal to her boarding-house. Now, there are boarding-houses and boarding-houses, but this was just a boarding-house. The sadly experienced ones will understand exactly what I mean. The happy, inexperienced ones may just skip the sentence.