“If you suit me,” said Regina, “and give me something that I can go home in, I will put myself unreservedly in your hands in the future. I know little or nothing about dress,” she went on, with a superior, platform kind of air—an assertion which made the lively Frenchwoman positively shudder—“yet I am feminine enough to wish to be well dressed.”
“Ah, we will satisfy madame. Well, Gabrielle?”
“I think,” said little Mademoiselle Gabrielle, “that madame will find the toque that came down yesterday would suit her as well as anything not specially made for her. I will get it, madame.”
She disappeared into the next room, returning with a large black toque in her hand. It was light in fabric, it was bright with jet, and a couple of handsome black plumes fell over the coiffure at the back.
“Ah, yes, Gabrielle, yes. Now try it on, madame. Not with those pins, they do not fit with the style of the hat. Madame will not mind to buy hat-pins?”
“If they are not ruinous,” said Regina, who was in a very much “in for a penny, in for a pound” kind of mind.
“Antoinette, Antoinette, bring the box of ’at-pins,” said Mademoiselle Gabrielle.
Immediately another little French girl came out carrying a large tray of hat-pins.
“Madame is not in mourning? We will not have jet—no, no! Now these?”
She pounced upon some cut-steel hat-pins which matched the ornaments on the hat, and then with deft and soft little fingers she firmly fixed the toque on Regina’s head.