"He's a man; so he'd be unable to talk freely, with a woman there," replied Narcisse. "You two would be posing and trying to make an impression on each other."
"Please!"
They were in the doorway, Narcisse blocking the passage to the offices. "Good-by," she said. "You mustn't push in between the poor and their bread and butter."
Amy was turning away. Her expression—forlorn, hurt, and movingly genuine—was too much for Narcisse's firmness. "You're not especially gay to-day," said she, relentingly.
Amy, quick as a child to detect the yielding note, brought her flitting mind back to Armstrong and her troubles. "My faith in a person I was very fond of has been—shaken." There was a break in her voice, and her bright shallow eyes were misty.
"Come in," said Narcisse, not wholly deceived, but too soft-hearted not to give Amy the benefit of the doubt, just as she gave to whining beggars, though she knew they were "working" her. Anyhow, was not Amy to be pitied on general principles, and dealt gently with, as a victim of the blight of wealth?
Amy never entered those offices without a new sensation of pleasure. The voluntary environment of a human being is a projection, a reflection, of his inner self, is the plain, undeceiving index to his real life—for, is not the life within, the drama of thought, the real life, and the drama of action but the imperfect, distorted shadowgraph? The barest room can be most significant of the personality of its tenant; his failure to make any impression on his surroundings is conclusive. The most crowded or the gaudiest room may tell the same story as the barest. The Siersdorfs conducted their business in five rooms, each a different expression of the simplicity and sincerity which characterized them and their work. There was the same notable absence of the useless, of the merely ornamental, the same making of every detail contributory both to use and to beauty. One wearies of rooms that are in any way ostentatious; proclamation of simplicity is as tedious as proclamation of pretentiousness. Those rooms seemed to diffuse serenity; they were like the friends of whom one never tires because they always have something new and interesting to offer. Especially did there seem to be something miraculous about Narcisse's own private office. It had few articles in it, and they unobtrusive; yet, to sit in that room and look about was to have as many differing impressions as one would get in watching a beam of white light upon a plain of virgin snow.
"How do you do it!" Amy exclaimed, as she seated herself. She almost always made the same remark in the same circumstances. "But then," she went on, "you are a miracle. Now, there's the dress you've got on—it's a jacket, a blouse, a belt and a skirt. But what have you done to it? How do you induce your dressmaker to put together such things for you?"
"You have to tell a dressmaker what to do," replied Narcisse, "and then you have to tell her how to do it. If she knew what to make and how, she'd not stop at dressmaking long. As I get only a few things, I can take pains with them. But you get so many that you have to accept what somebody else has thought out, and just as they've thought it out."
"And the result is, I look a frump," said Amy, half believing it for the moment.