Chapter TEN: I

There was one particular day--a sort of seventh wave in her steady tide of success--that Angelica always remembered. To begin with, when she reached Fine Feathers, there was what Miss Devery had promised her should be there--‘ANGÉLIQUE,’ in purple letters across the two front windows. She stopped in the street to admire it, in delight, almost in awe. So far had she come, with such celerity--she, the one-time factory worker! It hardly seemed possible!

She lingered to think of her present magic life, so full of delights and satisfactions; her days filled with this work that she loved, handling the silks, the satins, the velvets, the plumes, the rhinestones, all the rich and vivid things she so adored; the chatter of Devery and Sillon, which never failed to entertain her; the very feeling of being an independent and promising young business woman, with an account well started in a savings-bank. She thought of the charmed evenings she sometimes spent with her partners--dinner at a near-by table d’hôte, and then a seat in the second balcony, to see some play which they had selected. She thought of those long, quiet evenings of study at home, in the tidy kitchen, with the clock that ticked so loudly on the tin tubs.

She was able now to give her mother a respectable sum every week. She was, in fact, rapidly becoming the most important member of the ‘Fine Feathers’ establishment, and she had some time ago entered into a new and far more advantageous arrangement with Miss Sillon. Devery and Sillon were clever and good workwomen, and they had built up a nice little business for themselves; but Angelica was something beyond that--she was the one person especially adapted at that instant of time to design hats which would superlatively please the women of that particular city.

She catered to women with money, of course. She raised her prices fantastically; and when women came in, shamefaced and apologetic because of the fierce denunciations of the war posters they saw outside, she knew just what to say.

"Yes, madam," she agreed. "A hundred and fifty dollars _is_ a large price for a simple little hat. Of course you can get some sort of thing for ten." She who not so long ago had been used to buy one for a dollar and trim it with all sorts of little scraps! "But it’s much more economical to get _one_ really _good_ one, that will keep its style until it’s worn out, than half a dozen cheaper ones."

None of her customers had yet pointed out that one could buy fifteen cheaper hats for this price, which, allowing three months for the season, would require of each hat less than a week’s endurance. Every one who came to her really wished to pay too much for a hat. They all knew, of course, that the bit of fur and lace and satin she gave them didn’t cost one-fifth of the price, but they paid the surplus for the style--that Angélique style.

She went into the back parlour, where Sillon and Devery were draping a collapsible form in a green tulle.

"Hello!" they both said, cheerfully.

"Wouldn’t you know this dress was for a fat woman--or should I say, a well-rounded figure?" said Devery. "They’re all wild about green, the big ones. I wonder why?"

"Congratulate her!" said Sillon. "Angelica, tell her how nice your name looks out there. There she was, all Sunday afternoon, painting it and talking about your greatness and your coming rise to fame and fortune."

Angelica sat down.

"It’s lovely," she said. "It makes me as happy as can be to see it there, like that; but I’ve been thinking--isn’t it all queer, and silly?--about their saying my hats are so becoming, and all that. Why, they could get lots of things that really suited them better for almost nothing! Do you know what I think it is? I think it’s because when I make ’em pay so much they take more pains in putting the things on, and that’s why they look better. They dress their hair so carefully, and try to have everything--harmonious."

"That’s a trade secret," said Sillon. "It isn’t at all the thing to say. Our line is, ‘Of course, if you want anything really good, you’ve got to pay for it.’ Stick to that, Angélique!"

"Down with the rich!" said Devery. "Bleed them white and drain them dry!"

"My father was a Socialist," said Angelica, with calm assurance. She had no need to add, and they had no need to know, that he had been a Socialist barber; nor was she yet advanced enough not to avoid, with ridiculous shame, her Italian blood. "Mother says he was specially furious at women who spent a lot on clothes."

This was another block in the edifice she was painfully erecting. She was creating for herself a past and an environment which, without being extravagantly false, should yet be in keeping with what she intended to become--a foundation for her coming greatness. She often mentioned, casually, her father and her mother and her Scotch grandparents. She admitted that she and her mother were poor, but she suggested an admirable and distinguished poorness. She had actually got so far as to indicate, with rare delicacy, that her being in business was a distress to her old-fashioned mother.

All through that day there was the same elating and intoxicating success. All the customers who came in were satisfied, praised her, and paid her money. Nothing went wrong.

At lunch-time Sillon made cocoa on the gas-stove in the pantry off the back parlour, and Devery cooked spaghetti. And for the first time they took her up into the little bedroom they had on the floor above, and showed her some of their belongings--photographs of uncles, brothers, cousins. Sillon had a stuffed cobra and a thrilling tale about it, and Devery some studies she had made in her Paris days.

Then they all went into the street, to look again at the "ANGÉLIQUE"; lingering in the October brightness, the wind blowing their skirts, their hair, making them frolicsome and gay.

"I _hate_ work!" said Devery, stretching up her thin arms, while her purple smock whipped about her lean, straight torso in classic folds.

"What would you like to do?" asked Angelica.

"Just live--like cats, without any aim. I’d never accomplish anything. Just as soon as you do accomplish anything, you see that it wasn’t worth doing. What _is_?"

"Devery, you’re morbid and hypocritical," said Sillon. "You don’t mean that. Besides, cats don’t feel like that, my child. When they’ve caught a mouse, they feel that it was very much worth doing."

"Oh, well, so do I! I think it’s worth while to catch my meals, somehow. Angelica, what an industrious soul you are! I don’t believe you’d enjoy being idle."

"I’d be miserable if I didn’t think I was getting forward."

"How did we get such a paragon?" asked Sillon.

"Suppose we go out to dinner?" suggested Devery suddenly. "Early, and then to the movies?"

"I’ll telephone to mother first," said Angelica, "to see if it will be all right if I don’t go home."

A punctilious and Eddie-like form, and nothing more.

"Mother!" she began. "I won’t be home for dinner."

"Angie!" came the very tremulous voice of Mrs. Kennedy, always distressed at the telephone. "Better come home as early as you can. There’s a lady here to see you--Mrs. Russell."

Angelica was shocked, terrified.

"Something’s happened to Eddie!" she thought at first. And then came an idea that turned her cold with fright. "They’ve found out! She knows! She’s come to tell me what she thinks of me!"

II

Nothing of the sort, however. Mrs. Russell sat there, waiting, all smiles and affability, for the sole purpose of inviting Angelica to visit Buena Vista. She had had a letter from Eddie, in which he had rather severely requested her to show all due civility to his future wife.

"He really means it!" she had said to her husband. "I hoped he’d forgotten. I really thought the thing had blown over. Beastly, isn’t it? Imagine her here!"

"It doesn’t frighten me," Dr. Russell said jauntily.

"Satyr!" she said. "You can’t be trusted out of my sight!"

And both he and she were pleased and proud of his senile impudence.

Mrs. Russell had been chatting with--or perhaps to--Mrs. Kennedy for a long time, about God knows what--the war, for one thing. Their views were very dissimilar; Mrs. Kennedy hadn’t a trace of patriotism. She maintained that it was a bad thing to kill so many young men, no matter why it was done. She wasn’t interested in German perfidy. She only hoped it would soon be over, no matter how. It wouldn’t make any difference who won, she said.

"Would you like to live under German rule," demanded Mrs. Russell, "and have some brutal Prussian officer swearing at you and ill-treating you?"

"I don’t believe officers would ever bother about me, American or German," she replied. "What would they be doing, hanging around where I was working? No, ma’am. Poor people haven’t got anything to lose. They don’t feel the same about their country; I dare say because they don’t own any of it. Of course, if those Germans were to come here, they’d very likely take away your house and your jewelry and so on; but they wouldn’t be likely to trouble _me_."

"But your daughter? She’s a very beautiful girl, you know. How would you like some unspeakable Hun to insult her--or worse?"

Mrs. Kennedy was silent. She felt in her heart that nothing much worse than what had happened could ever happen to her child. She simply listened to her visitor’s accounts of outrages with decent, womanly interest.

She was included in Mrs. Russell’s invitation to Angelica to spend a week-end at Buena Vista, but she refused, as she was obviously intended to do.

"Thank you kindly," she said. "I haven’t the time."

"Why don’t you go, mother?" Angelica asked her, out of curiosity, when they were alone again. "I should think you’d like to make a visit in a fine house like that. And it’s going to be mine some day!"

"I don’t think so," said Mrs. Kennedy. "I don’t believe the Almighty would allow such a thing. No, Angelica, there’s many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip."

"Not when your hand’s steady."

Mrs. Kennedy was a little bewildered at having her time-honoured maxim treated imaginatively.

"Even then," she said, after an instant, "some one can come behind and give you a shove; or the Almighty can interfere."

Angelica, at the zenith of her triumph, invited guest of Mrs. Russell, publicly acknowledged as Eddie’s betrothed, smiled.

"He won’t!" she said. "He’s on my side!"