“My God, Mademoiselle Anatoline, are you making a bouquet or tying bristles on a broomstick? And Heaven pardon me, Mademoiselle Eulalie, but if those hands of yours have been washed since--since---- What have you been doing with those hands, _ma fille_? Blacking the boots or scratching your head?” Anatoline, who was large and fat and fair, became an apoplectic purple; and Eulalie, who was the colour of a lemon with hair like a raven’s wing, turned a shade more livid than nature had made her. There was a titter, beginning sycophantically upon the lips of Mademoiselle Panache. But Pamela’s smooth face, white where it was not delicately carnation, might have been that of a handsomely tinted statue. She cut her thread, tweaked one of the shimmering purple loops, and once again putting the hat on her clenched hand, gave it a little shake. The creation was complete! Madame’s swift beady eye rolled in her direction. “Give yourself the trouble to bring that upstairs to the showroom, Meess,” she ordered. “Madame D’Aimargues said she would call, herself, before midday, to try it on before it was sent. I will join you presently and you had better remain, in case there were required an alteration.” “_Bien, M’dame_,” Pamela responded with some alacrity. She might get a whiff of good open air as she went up the stairs. There might even be a window ajar in the showroom. Such a miracle had been known to occur on a very hot day. Monsieur Ildefonse, Eglantine’s husband, was sitting in the little glass cage off the back showroom, pompously referred to as the _Bureau_. This individual had once been a very noted personality; no other, actually, than the French Queen’s appointed coiffeur; in consequence sought after to frenzy by every woman with the smallest pretension to Fashion. Fine ladies had had their heads dressed at six o’clock in the morning, nay, even three days before some special assembly at Court. To be able to say, with a toss of flying vaporous curls, exquisitely redolent of _Poudre à la Maréchale_: “In effect, my dear one, Ildefonse’s last idea, what do you think of it? It is succeeded. _Hein?_” To be responded to, perchance, with a cry of envy and despair: “Ildefonse! You managed to get Ildefonse!” And to know your interlocutor, younger than you perhaps, and prettier, yet altogether at a disadvantage, “a positive frump, my dear,” under less skilful hands, that had been to reach, in verity, the very needle-peak of feminine triumph, a few years ago.