Madame Elena was very good-natured, not at all the overbearing and dictatorial principal that Lydia had half expected to find her. They worked together in her room all the morning, Lydia uninterruptedly, and Madame Elena in the midst of many respectful summonses and urgent telephone calls.
Just before one o’clock, a tall girl with dark hair, dressed in the saleswoman’s austerely smart black and white, once more announced the arrival of an important client.
Madame Elena darted through into the shop again, and this time was away for nearly an hour.
Through the door of her tiny office, which she had left ajar, Lydia could hear an occasional phrase:
“I really don’t think you’d ever regret it ... it’s so exactly your style. I really shouldn’t urge it if I didn’t think you’d be pleased with it.... Oh, no, Moddam—you couldn’t call that cerise by any possibility. Old rose it is—just your shade....”
Madame Elena came back at last, flinging herself into the chair before the writing-table.
“Oof! I thought we should never get done. She meant to take it, all the time, too. Now, Miss Raymond, let’s see you enter that. Here’s the bill.”
“Motor-bonnet, at seventy-five and sixpence,” Lydia read.
“You must describe it in your entry, so that we shall recognize it,” Madame Elena declared. “Turn up the invoice.”
When Lydia had found it she discovered with surprise that the recent purchase figured as “Rose-red and ash-grey motoring capote.”