"Do tell Mrs. Averill—I’m staying with her—what you’ve just been saying about the wool. Did you know, Lulu, that Indian wool is hard and Chinese soft?" She looked again toward the hallway, where a second figure had come into view. "Mildred, do come here. There’s the most interesting things—I’m so glad I went to that place this morning—and they’ve sent me the most interesting man—Lulu’s like ice, but you’re artistic." Miss Averill, too, advanced into the room; but though I was in full view she paid me and my comrades no particular attention. It was the easier for me not to speak, or to draw any one’s glance to myself, for the reason that Mrs. Mountney chattered on, repeating for Mildred’s benefit the facts I had just been giving her. "Just think of having the patience to clip with the scissors round all these designs, and it’s the same in the modern rug as in the antique. Do stoop down, Mildred, and let your fingers run along the ciseling; that’s what this—this gentleman calls it." As the girl stooped to satisfy Mrs. Mountney, I ventured to look at her more closely. She was perhaps not older than when I had last seen her two years before, but her face had undergone a change. It made you think of faces chastened, possibly purified, by suffering. Where there had been chiefly a sympathetic common sense there was now the beauty that comes of elevation. Luckily for me Mrs. Mountney ran on, while we three men, with the lack of individuality of employees before customers, remained indistinguishable objects in the background. "That’s the modern and that’s the antique; and I’m sure no one but a rug-man could tell the difference between them. This man—this gentleman—says they can, but that’s only business. Hundreds of dollars difference in the price, almost as much as between a pair of real pearl ear-rings and imitation ones. What do you say, Mildred? Would anybody ever notice—?" "I suppose you’d be buying the best because it’s the best, and not because any one would notice—" "I should be buying it for what every one would see. What’s the good of having a thing if it doesn’t show what it is? I hate the way some people have of calling your attention to every fine thing they’ve got in the house, as if you weren’t used to fine things of your own. If I’ve got to tell every one that that’s a genuine old Chinese masterpiece before they notice it—well, it isn’t worth it. But at the same time the effect is richer; and some people do know, and talk about it to other people who know—there’s that to consider." By this time I was conscious of something else.