I wished to know what Stéphanie was getting for a day’s work on her fine bouquets. She has been making lace for seventy years, is intelligent and quick, and her maximum wage is two cents an hour, a franc for a day of ten hours. I asked about the future—she has thought of that, not without anxiety, and is providing at seventy-eight for what she calls “old age” by trying hard to put by two cents a week. Madame C. has been kind to her, and gives her as much freedom and comfort as she can offer; for instance, when Stéphanie was ill for three days last week, she did not deduct her wages. She would gladly double her pay, or triple it, for she realizes there are few like Stéphanie left, but the Paris firm to whom she sells pays so little for her lace that she has never been able to offer more than a franc a day. “If I could give two francs, I could quickly gather a company of 1,000 contented lace-makers, I am certain,” she said. “But when my old workers fall ill or die, I find no young girls willing to come to me; they prefer the twenty francs a week they can make picking wool. When Stéphanie goes, I shall have no single artist to replace her.” “_C’est un vrai cœur de dentelle_” (she is a true heart of lace), she said affectionately, as she patted her on the shoulder. And then she went to fetch a cardboard box and I took a chair by the table, to watch her unfold what it might contain. She spread three beautiful widths of Application on blue paper so that I might better see the tiny bouquets and scattered buds and leaves that blossomed from the fine quality of machine-made tulle; all these had come from Stéphanie’s bobbins, and she was having difficulty to continue at her cushion because of her eagerness to explain them. They were French designs, as their charming lines had made me suspect. In the box with the Application were two rolls of Point d’Angleterre, the lace one finds rarely at present. We held the first one, a length of four meters, six inches wide, against the light, and then Stéphanie could sit still no longer; she knew something about this piece, for she had made its first flower in 1911, and not finished its last until the war was half over. She pointed out the spaces where a special needle-worker had introduced almost microscopic open stitches into her leaves and blooms to give them even greater airiness, and showed how almost impossible it would have been to execute these needle-stitches with bobbins; and how difficult is the stitch made with a special crochet-hook required for the raised veins and outlines (brodes) of the petals and leaves, since the hook must catch and attach the thread each time beneath the surface. Finally, a needle-worker, again, as is always the case in Point d’Angleterre, had spun the clear web between the flowers, uniting them all into the finished flounce. Stéphanie pointed to a single detail. “It took me five days to make that tiny bouquet, and the needle-worker one and a half days more to add the open