aving her, I
walked slowly out into the country part of the town where I lived. The
lilacs were all blooming in the yards, and the smell of them after the
rain, of the new leaves and the blossoms together, blew into my face with
a sort of bitter sweetness. I tramped through the puddles and under the
showery trees, mourning for Marguerite Gauthier as if she had died only
yesterday, sighing with the spirit of 1840, which had sighed so much, and
which had reached me only that night, across long years and several
languages, through the person of an infirm old actress. The idea is one
that no circumstances can frustrate. Wherever and whenever that piece is
put on, it is April.

IV

HOW well I remember the stiff little parlor where I used to wait for Lena:
the hard horsehair furniture, bought at some auction sale, the long
mirror, the fashion-plates on the wall. If I sat down even for a moment I
was sure to find threads and bits of colored silk clinging to my clothes
after I went away. Lena's success puzzled me. She was so easy-going; had
none of the push and self-assertiveness that get people ahead in business.
She had come to Lincoln, a country girl, with no introductions except to
some cousins of Mrs. Thomas who lived there, and she was already making
clothes for the women of "the young married set." She evidently had great
natural aptitude for her work. She knew, as she said, "what people looked
well in." She never tired of poring over fashion books. Sometimes in the
evening I would find her alone in her work-room, draping folds of satin on
a wire figure, with a quite blissful expression of countenance. I could
n't help thinking that the years when Lena literally had n't enough
clothes to cover herself might have something to do with her untiring
interest in dressing the human figure. Her clients said that Lena "had
style," and overlooked her habitual inaccuracies. She never, I discovered,
finished anything by the time she had promised, and she frequently spent
more money on materials than her customer had authorized. Once, when I
arrived at six o'clock, Lena was ushering out a fidgety mother and her
awkward, overgrown daughter. The woman detained Lena at the door to say
apologetically:--

"You'll try to keep it under fifty for me, won't you, Miss Lingard? You
see, she's really too young to come to an expensive dressmaker, but I knew
you could do more with her than anybody else."

"Oh, that will be all right,