By that time, the change in appearance of the Bodkin Millinery was so great that parties interested in fall millinery and innovations, were beginning to come in. In the most attractive dress she possessed suitable for such use, with her really pretty hair drawn back loosely and coiled becomingly on her head, Marcia proved herself equal to the tongue of each newcomer. She had the advantage of not being taken unawares. She knew how the wolves of society harried the sheep of adventure; she had no intention of becoming their prey. Who she was, where she had come from, why she was there, she evaded, as slickly as the dews of night roll from the cabbage leaf of dawn. The qualities of satin and velvet, the colouring of ribbons and flowers, she found engrossing subjects. She had a way of picking up a wreath of artificial flowers and twisting the leaves into the most attractive shapes. Before she offered any hat for sale, she set it upon her own head and walked up and down behind the counter, turning and twisting to show the customer how it looked upon the head of a woman. When the customer had tried it upon her own head, if it did not fit or was not becoming, Marcia said so frankly. In these cases she ended by telling the purchaser that the shape of her head and her face were so individual that the only thing to do was to build a hat to suit her. She was capable of picking up a piece of buckram and with the shears deftly cutting therefrom a pattern for a hat, that with a little twist here and there, and trimming, would evolve into a shape that comfortably fitted and greatly enhanced the facial lines for which it was intended. Often she suggested a change in hair dressing, at times made a friend for life by deftly making the improvement herself. It took Marcia six weeks to make Bodkin’s Millinery the most attractive hat store in the flourishing town of Bluffport. With the first money that the firm could spare, the entire front of the building got a second coat of paint and the interior both paint and paper. The one thing that surprised Nancy Bodkin and caused the townspeople a minute of wonder, was the fact that when the freshly painted sign went up, it was an exact duplicate of the old one. Said Nancy: “Now that sign must have your name on it, too, and from the start we must share equally in the profits. It’s a sure thing that all the work you are doing and the wonderful way you can sell things, is worth as much to me as the use of the building is to you.” But Marcia said authoritatively that she thought the best thing to do was merely to go on using the old sign, with which people were familiar. She had noticed that human nature was so perverse and contrary that it did not take kindly to changes. She thought the sign had much better be left merely “Bodkin Millinery.”