day when she might
aspire to exercise the talents she felt confident of possessing; only
experienced workers were entrusted with the delicate art of shaping and
trimming the hat, and the forewoman still held her inexorably to the
routine of preparatory work.

She began to rip the spangles from the frame, listening absently to the
buzz of talk which rose and fell with the coming and going of Miss
Haines's active figure. The air was closer than usual, because Miss
Haines, who had a cold, had not allowed a window to be opened even during
the noon recess; and Lily's head was so heavy with the weight of a
sleepless night that the chatter of her companions had the incoherence of
a dream.

"I TOLD her he'd never look at her again; and he didn't. I wouldn't have,
either--I think she acted real mean to him. He took her to the Arion
Ball, and had a hack for her both ways.... She's taken ten bottles, and
her headaches don't seem no better--but she's written a testimonial to
say the first bottle cured her, and she got five dollars and her picture
in the paper.... Mrs. Trenor's hat? The one with the green Paradise?
Here, Miss Haines--it'll be ready right off.... That was one of the
Trenor girls here yesterday with Mrs. George Dorset. How'd I know? Why,
Madam sent for me to alter the flower in that Virot hat--the blue tulle:
she's tall and slight, with her hair fuzzed out--a good deal like Mamie
Leach, on'y thinner...."

On and on it flowed, a current of meaningless sound, on which,
startlingly enough, a familiar name now and then floated to the surface.
It was the strangest part of Lily's strange experience, the hearing of
these names, the seeing the fragmentary and distorted image of the world
she had lived in reflected in the mirror of the working-girls' minds. She
had never before suspected the mixture of insatiable curiosity and
contemptuous freedom with which she and her kind were discussed in this
underworld of toilers who lived on their vanity and self-indulgence.
Every girl in Mme. Regina's work-room knew to whom the headgear in her
hands was destined, and had her opinion of its future wearer, and a
definite knowledge of the latter's place in the social system. That Lily
was a star fallen from that sky did not, after the first stir of
curiosity had subsided, materially add to their interest in her. She had
fallen, she had "gone under," and true to the ideal of their race, they
were awed only by success--by the gross ta