The apartment being on the top floor of a five-story building, it is necessary to account for the remaining four. In the rear of the fourth floor there was a small kitchen and pantry from which a dumb-waiter ascended and descended with vehement enthusiasm. The remainder of the floor was divided into four rather small chambers, each opening into the outer hall, with two bath-rooms inserted. Each of these rooms contained a series of lockers, not unlike those in a club-house. Otherwise they were unfurnished except for a few commonplace cane bottom chairs in various stages of decrepitude.
The third floor represented a complete apartment of five rooms, daintily furnished. This was where the Marchioness really lived.
Commerce, after a fashion, occupied the two lower floors. It stopped short at the bottom of the second flight of stairs where it encountered an obstacle in the shape of a grill-work gate that bore the laconic word "Private," and while commerce may have peeped inquisitively through and beyond the barrier it was never permitted to trespass farther than an occasional sly, surreptitious and unavailing twist of the knob.
The entire second floor was devoted to work-rooms in which many sewing machines buzzed during the day and went to rest at six in the evening. Tables, chairs, manikins, wall-hooks and hangers thrust forward a bewildering assortment of fabrics in all stages of development, from an original uncut piece to a practically completed garment. In other words, here was the work-shop of the most exclusive, most expensive modiste in all the great city.
The ground floor, or rather the floor above the English basement, contained the salon and fitting rooms of an establishment known to every woman in the city as
DEBORAH'S.
To return to the Marchioness and Julia.
"Not that a little dust or even a great deal of dirt will make any different to the Princess," the former was saying, "but, just the same, I feel better, if I know we've done our best."
"Thank the Lord, she don't come very often," was Julia's frank remark. "It's the stairs, I fancy."
"And the car-fare," added her mistress. "Is it six o'clock, Julia?"