And when the visitor had made her wants known she was conducted, if her need was of gowns or tailored suits or hats, up the winding marble stairway to the miniature theatre on the floor above. She was aided in the ascent by the balustrade of metal covered with mull velvet.
Madame Francine’s sense of the appropriate and impressive setting rose to its heights in the room she entered at the top of these stairs. Here the rugs were of grey, the woodwork and walls and draperies blending unobtrusively in the colours of the showroom below. On a marble mantel to the left stood in solemn dignity a marvellously fashioned clock, so beautifully made, one felt it almost a profanation that it should measure unimportant things like minutes and hours. To each side of it there stood a delicately carved candlestick of shiny brass, their brightness matching the framework of the long table with marble top on which rested sketchbooks of designs and models. The tiny stage fitted with footlights and drops, its flooring of squares of black and white marble, glowed with impressive and anticipatory dignity. Daintily clad and perfumed and manicured ladies lolled at ease upon divans or in straight-backed chairs, according to tastes and sizes, while mannequins pirouetted and posed and paraded around and across the stage. Every detail had been minutely scrutinized, every bit of unobtrusive allure had been utilized to induce the dawdling audience to the point of conviction and purchase. Instinctively one lowered one’s voice—the temple must not be profaned. One bought, too, for few were strong enough to resist the feeling that all this had been designed and executed solely for one’s own private delectation, and certainly one could not be guilty of base ingratitude through failure to render homage by ordering one or more of the creations displayed. …
But all this magnificence was terra incognita to Mimi for many, many months after she had begun work as a finisher at Francine’s. There were four other floors occupied by workrooms and tailoring-rooms and lunchroom. There was the basement used as an office and stockroom and shipping-room. In the upper stories the finishers and drapers and drapers’ assistants and fitters and clerks and stenographers and tailors moved and had their being. These were never seen by customers, nor were the first two floors ever seen by any employees save the sales persons, except when viewed in hasty peeps after hours. These workers entered through rear or side doors, ascended to their work tables by rear elevators, saw nothing of the pageant enacted daily in the same building.
Timidly Mimi told the imposing and businesslike fitter her qualifications as a wielder of the needle and thimble. In these less dignified purlieus there was no need of lowered voices, and the rush of work in the pre-Easter season had shortened tempers and sharpened tongues. Mimi would have fled madly from the scene had not she so eagerly wanted work, and work at Francine’s. Timidly, yet desperately, she emphasized her ability and experience. She clinched her claim to fitness by her training at the Manhattan Trade School, though the diffidence with which she advanced this argument would have defeated its purpose had not there been need of a finisher at Francine’s and a very pressing need on that particular day when Mimi made her application.
Deftly, quickly, she did the work assigned her. From eight-thirty each weekday morning until five-thirty she plied her needle, head bent low at the table given her in the long workroom on the fourth floor. She seldom spoke to any of the other thirty girls except when addressed directly, but she stole many a furtive glance at them, envying their pert assurance, their complete lack of awe at their surroundings save when the eyes of the fitter or a very rare visit from Francine herself hushed their whispered chatter. “Talking and work don’t go together—one or the other will be neglected and always it will be the work that suffers,” the fitter had told Mimi on her first day. The other girls obeyed this injunction—to have done otherwise would have brought reproof and in time dismissal. But no sooner did the fitter leave the room than they gushed forth a torrent of whispered comments, of subdued snickering. And even when the coldly efficient fitter was with them but her eyes not upon them, they found ways of communication to relieve the tedium of silence.
Because her wages were small as a finisher and because her need of work was great, Mimi obeyed implicitly the instructions given her. She made few friends, and even these few were kept at a distance. Only one girl progressed beyond the barrier Mimi imposed. Sylvia Smith was the name she gave Mimi, and their tables adjoined.
“How do you like Old Faithful?” Sylvia inquired as she led Mimi to the lunchroom where the girls were provided with tea or coffee at noon while they ate the lunches they had brought.
“Old Faithful?” Mimi, puzzled, inquired.
“Yeah—the fitter we got,” Sylvia mumbled as she bit deep into a sandwich.
“Oh—she’s very nice.”
“You don’t know her, kid. She’s a pain—just wait until you do something wrong—you’ll want to jump down her throat when she bawls you out with all the other girls grinning at you behind her back.”
“I hope then I’ll never make any mistakes,” Mimi murmured.
“Don’t worry, kiddo. You’ll make ’em. And the best way to handle Old Faithful is to keep your mouth shut and let her gab on until she runs out of breath. The one we had before she came was a coloured girl—she knew her stuff and we didn’t try no monkey business with her, either. But she treated us like we were human—”
“A coloured girl?” Mimi
