“Purple!” ejaculated Madame Eglantine, surprised into a quite amiable tone; “purple for that blonde Marquise who is not yet twenty! And she means to wear all white muslins with lace in floods. Did I not tell you so? That ribbon I bought for _Madame la Gouvernante_--it is for dowagers----” She broke off and stared. Pamela had twisted and snipped and pinched and the hat was trimmed in what her famous _patronne_ herself would have described as “_un tour de main_.” She now held it up on her balled hand, and turned it slowly from side to side. “But it is a stroke of genius!” exclaimed the little Frenchwoman. She hated Pamela, but she was above all an artist. “No, no, do not touch it again, no one must touch it! You have a thousand times reason. Blue or green or pink--anyone with the ordinary mind would have blended me the banal pretty-pretty with those cowslips. The Marquise would have been but one of a score of shepherdesses, no more distinguished than a dragée box for a baptism! But now----” She paused and waved her hands before the delight of the mental picture. A small, dusky woman with very bright eyes and extraordinarily swift movements, she was like some quick furry animal of the mouse tribe; a greater contrast to the fair, large, composed English girl could hardly be imagined; yet on one point these two were singularly akin. Both were geniuses in the same restricted yet fascinating realm of art. If there were a creature on earth capable of stepping straight off into the shoes of Madame Eglantine, first milliner in the world of Fashion, it was Pamela Pounce, the British yeoman’s daughter! Perhaps it was this consciousness of her rival’s merits which made the Frenchwoman, while too acute of intellect not to recognise them, regard her clever apprentice with feelings which approached detestation. Yet she was soon to find another cause. “I’d better put in the stitches myself, I suppose, M’dame?” said Pamela tranquilly. She spoke French fluently by this time, with a pronounced if not unpleasing British accentuation. “The young ladies are so fond of sewing things to death. It’s like a hand on pastry,” she went on meditatively, as she bit her thread, and flung a cool, tantalising glance at the irate ring of countenances about her. “You have, or you haven’t got it, and no one to blame.” “That will do, Meess. There is too much conversation here, Mademoiselle Panache!” Madame hopped spitefully from Pamela upon the directress, who, sitting large, square and sallow at the centre table, dispensing materials, had permitted herself a gratified smile over the snubbing of the English girl. For a moment or two there was silence in the over-lighted, under-ventilated apartment. The season was early July; a blazing white sunshine was pouring down through the casements which their muffed glass but feebly mitigated. Then the little angry, sharp-toothed mouse that was the bland, coaxing, fluent Eglantine of the showroom found a fresh grievance.