o. I will none of it."

Madame, who had clasped her hands and half risen in her excited protest,
sank back in her chair and fixed her eyes on a robe just ready to send
home,--a creation so simply elegant and so charming that her brow
smoothed and she smiled, well pleased. But her words were simply the
echo of others of the same order, spoken by others who had watched the
course of women's occupations and who had actual love for the profession
they had chosen.

Questions brought out a state of things much the same for both Paris and
London, where the system of learning the business had few differences.
For both millinery and dressmaking, apprenticeship had been the rule,
the more important houses taking an entrance fee and lessening the
number of years required; the others demanding simply the full time of
the learner, from two to four years. In these latter cases food and
lodging were given, and after the first six months a small weekly wage,
barely sufficient to provide the Sunday food and lodging. If more was
paid, the learner lived outside entirely; and the first year or two was
a sharp struggle to make ends meet. But if any talent showed itself,
promotion was rapid, and with it the prospect of independence in the
end, the directress of a group of girls regarding such talent as
developed by the house and a part of its reputation. In some cases such
girls by the end of the third year received often five or six thousand
francs, and in five were their own mistresses absolutely, with an income
of ten or twelve thousand and often more.

This for the exception; for the majority was the most rigid
training,--with its result in what we know as French finish, which is
simply delicate painstaking with every item of the work,--and a wage of
from thirty to forty francs a week, often below but seldom above this
sum.

In the early stages of the apprenticeship there was simply an allowance
of from six to ten francs per month for incidental expenses, and even
when skill increased and services became valuable, five francs a week
was considered an ample return. In all these cases the week passed under
the roof of the employer, and Sunday alone became the actual change of
the worker. The excessive hours of the London apprentice had no
counterpart here or had not until the great houses were founded and
steam and electric power came with the sewing-machine. With this new
regime over-time was often claimed, and two sous an hour allowe