Ada had tried offering herself as a music teacher, for she played well and liked music, but wherever she went she was asked whom she had studied under, and if she had been taught in Germany. So to-day she was bent on another mission. She had put her pride still further down in her pocket, but unconsciously her pretty chin was tilted a little higher. She had to walk now—her tender feet were tired and weary—where she had once dashed along in a smart carriage. When she arrived at a part of the town which was little occupied by shops her steps slackened. She was thinking what she would say when she reached Madame Maude’s, the fashionable milliner from whom she had been accustomed to buy her hats. Madame Maude had only one window to her shop, which was curtained and lined with red velvet. The simple sailor hat, one black toque, and a white feather boa displayed in it gave the ignorant public little idea of the fact that almost every time the door bell rang to admit a customer, it meant that Madame Maude was fifty dollars the richer. Ada stopped a moment and looked at the window. How often she had gone with her mother to the shop and come away with some pretty flowery hat without even asking the price of it. And now she sighed, for the price of one of those hats would pay for a term of Marjorie’s lessons at school. They must be educated, the girl cried in her heart, and they must be brought up as her mother’s children ought to be, even if they had to work afterwards. She would not let them grow up as shop-girls from childhood. She opened the door and found herself inside the shop with no words ready to meet the question of the young girl who came forward.
“Can I see Madame Maude?” she asked nervously. “I wish to speak to her alone.”
The girl stared at Ada’s perfectly-fitting dress, robbed of all its luxurious trimmings, as being unsuitable for her present position. Madame Maude came forward and told the girl to retire.
“What can I do for you?” she said kindly; she knew that the large bill still standing in Mrs. Nicoli’s name would never be paid, but Mrs. Nicoli had been a good customer in the days gone by, and for once a woman was grateful for favours past.
“You have heard of our sad trouble,” Ada began, “the world has painted it even blacker than it is, so there is no need for me to tell you what a terrible position I am in. I must make money somehow. I have tried in so many ways and failed. I came to ask you if you knew of any position in a business house that I could fill. I would not mind how hard I worked.” She looked so unlike hard work that Madame Maude’s heart was touched by her appeal which was so pathetically ignorant.
“What can you do?” she said, wondering what the girl called “hard work.”
“I don’t know,” Ada replied in a shamefaced way, “for I have never tried, but I think I could learn millinery very quickly.”
“My dear child,” the elder woman said, “you don’t know what you are saying. Do you know that my best hand was apprenticed for three years before she received a dollar; the next year she got a little more than a dollar a week, the fifth year she went to Paris and studied for a year and a half. She is not only a milliner but an artist; it takes years to acquire the knowledge, and I pay her accordingly. My hats are not made by girls who have trimmed up their old hats at home.”
Ada looked crestfallen. “I never thought of all that; I only know that your hats are always in perfect taste.”
Madame Maude had been looking at her while she spoke. “If you won’t be offended, I’ll make you an offer,” she said.