“Well, Miss Rose, here’s your new neighbor,” she announced. “I’ve got my rooms fixed at last, an’ it took some straightening, let me tell you! I suppose Mis’ Johnson thought she had everything clean, but poor old soul, I reckon she can’t see so very good. An’ now I’ve come to visit with you a spell. “Well,” she went on, sweeping her bold dark eyes condescendingly around the shop, “you got a right nice place here. I wouldn’t have looked for anything so nice in such a rotten little town.” Julie had gotten up as though to serve her, and stood waiting behind the counter, but Elizabeth waved a protesting hand. “Oh don’t mind me. I’ll just look about and make myself at home, and if I find anything I like I’ll let you know. That’s a right pretty hat--that red one. What’s the price of it?--Oh well,” she continued, after Julie had told her, “I’ll wait a while. You’ll have to put it down ’fore the season’s over. People ain’t payin’ much for hats a war year like this. It ain’t patriotic. Besides it ain’t a style that would suit everybody. But it looks good on me, don’t it? Red’s one of my best colors.” She put on the hat, and preened herself before Julie’s mirror. In her pink dress, crowned by the red hat, she made a garish flash of color, given back in duplicate from the mirror. Her overpowering personality dominated the place. Julie had been working all day and was tired. Glancing across, she saw her own sober little figure with its pale face mirrored beside Elizabeth’s pink and red. For a moment she contemplated the two figures side by side in sharp contrast, then she stooped to her sewing once more. Elizabeth saw the reflections and laughed. “We look kind of funny together, don’t we,” she said complacently. Then she moved to get a better view of herself, and Julie’s reflection was blotted out by her dominant pink. “You ain’t got your mirror in a very good light,” she informed Julie. “If I was you, I’d hang it over on that side; and I’d get a better one. This don’t make people look their best, an’ what you want in a shop like this is a glass that’ll just make people look better’n they ever looked in their lives before, so they’ll think, ‘My, ain’t that hat becomin’!’ An’ then they’ll buy the hat, an’ never know it was the mirror all the time. That’s the way to sell hats, dearie! Oh, I could show you a heap about running your shop.” Julie said nothing, but went steadily on with her sewing, her needle weaving deftly in and out of the soft blue material she was at work on; but Elizabeth was too completely wrapped up in her own atmosphere to be aware of the other’s unresponsiveness.