ed.

Just after her late dinner on the eighth day of her Paris stay, Sophy
Gold was seated in the hotel lobby. Paris thronged with American
business buyers--those clever, capable, shrewd-eyed women who swarm on
the city in June and strip it of its choicest flowers, from ball gowns
to back combs. Sophy tried to pick them from the multitude that swept
past her. It was not difficult. The women visitors to Paris in June
drop easily into their proper slots.

There were the pretty American girls and their marvellously
young-looking mammas, both out-Frenching the French in their efforts to
look Parisian; there were rows of fat, placid, jewel-laden Argentine
mothers, each with a watchful eye on her black-eyed, volcanically calm,
be-powdered daughter; and there were the buyers, miraculously dressy in
next week's styles in suits and hats--of the old-girl type most of them,
alert, self-confident, capable.

They usually returned to their hotels at six, limping a little,
dog-tired; but at sight of the brightly lighted, gay hotel foyer they
would straighten up like war-horses scenting battle and achieve an
effective entrance from the doorway to the lift.

In all that big, busy foyer Sophy Gold herself was the one person
distinctly out of the picture. One did not know where to place her. To
begin with, a woman as irrevocably, irredeemably ugly as Sophy was an
anachronism in Paris. She belonged to the gargoyle period. You found
yourself speculating on whether it was her mouth or her nose that made
her so devastatingly plain, only to bring up at her eyes and find that
they alone were enough to wreck any ambitions toward beauty. You knew
before you saw it that her hair would be limp and straggling.

You sensed without a glance at them that her hands would be bony, with
unlovely knuckles.

The Fates, grinning, had done all that. Her Chicago tailor and milliner
had completed the work. Sophy had not been in Paris ten minutes before
she noticed that they were wearing 'em long and full. Her coat was short
and her skirt scant. Her hat was small. The Paris windows were full of
large and graceful black velvets of the Lillian Russell school.

"May I sit here?"

Sophy looked up into the plump, pink, smiling face of one of those very
women of the buyer type on whom she had speculated ten minutes before--a
good-natured face with shrewd, twinkling eyes. At sight of it you
forgave her her skittish white-kid-topped shoes.

"Certainly," smile