“That sounds more like it!” said the principal, in satisfied accents. “Now you’ll know how it should go down on the account.”
She pulled out a gold watch from her tight waist-band.
“Poor child! the girls will have finished dinner. I suppose they didn’t like to fetch you while you were in here—and quite right too. You’d better come out and get some lunch with me.”
They went out through the show-room, and Lydia saw Rosie Graham sitting in the small, glass-panelled box near the door, with neat piles of change on the ledge in front of her.
As they went past, Lydia meekly walking behind Madame Elena, Rosie made a derisive face at her, and Lydia understood that it was an unusual honour to be taken out to lunch by the principal.
They went to a small restaurant close by, and Madame Elena made Lydia blush by remarking impressively to the waitress who brought them the bill of fare:
“Make out two separate bills for this, waitress. Now, my dear, what are you going to have?”
Lydia had not expected to be Madame Elena’s guest at the meal, but she considered the emphasis indelicate, and wished that it had not been thought necessary.
On the whole, however, she liked Madame Elena, who kept up an incessant stream of lively talk, and gave her a quantity of information about the business, the customers and the staff.
“That little Graham, now—she’s been with us ever since we opened, and done her job first class. But she’ll never do any better for herself than she’s doing now. The reason why, because she’s got no tact. I’d never trust her to show so much as a motor-veil to a client—she’d tell her the colour was too young for her, as soon as winking. Of course, my dear, I’m telling you these things because you’re not quite in the same position as the show-room girls. That’s an understood thing, and has been from the first. More like my understudy you’ll come to be in time, I hope. That is if you and I understand one another, as I think we’re going to.”