So Miss Devery set to work. She designed and made for Angelica an extraordinary dress of dark red jersey cloth that fitted her like a snake-skin, as she said. It was entirely plain and severe, with long sleeves and a skirt reaching to her ankles. It made her look lean, tall, and savage. Then she parted her hair in the middle and knotted it low on her neck, hung big gold earrings in her ears, and around her neck a string of cloudy pale-green beads reaching to her knees. When all this was done, she called in Miss Sillon.
"Now!" she said. "What, eh?"
"Barbaric," said Miss Sillon; "but Lord, how attractive the creature is! Seriously, though," she added, "do you think she fits in with our nice little quaintness? She’s positively terrible!"
"A new thing in milliners," said Miss Devery. "Sillon, I’m proud! She’s my masterpiece."
"Very well," said Miss Sillon. "We won’t touch her. She shall stand as you have made her; but, Angélique, my child, how you will have to design to keep up with your appearance!"
"I can do it," said Angelica firmly. "I’ve got some fine ideas."
For what had she been doing of late but visiting the Public Library and studying the lives of all of Eddie’s magnificent women whom she could remember, and, from their portraits, gleaning the suggestions upon which she later worked?
She was supremely happy at her work. To sit sewing with Miss Devery and Miss Sillon all the morning, listening to their bright and jolly talk, and entering into it, was unfailing delight. They quite frankly admired her brains and her beauty, and treated her exactly as one of themselves. If they saw any difference, anything inferior in her, they concealed it.
Angelica felt that they didn’t know, that they imagined her to be of the same class as themselves. It didn’t occur to her that they didn’t care; that so long as she behaved herself with amiability and good sense, and was of value in their business, they were in no way concerned about her grammar or her table manners. She imagined that they were always looking for signs of good breeding, signs of bad breeding, little tricks she hadn’t learned yet. She used to read all that sort of thing in the women’s magazines, and she often discovered, to her deep distress, that she had been doing horrible things, even in the presence of Devery and Sillon. She had, for instance, put on her gloves in the street; she had said "phone" and "auto," and still they remained friendly.
They were a type entirely novel to her; she had not even read of their sort. Well-born and well-educated English-women, they had knocked about the world to an amazing extent. There was very little they didn’t know, although there was a very great deal they chose to ignore in life.