“Ah—modest, eh? Well, I like that in you—swelled heads don’t go very far with me. Oh, excuse me! Sit down, won’t you?”
Mimi sat. The request was more a demand. She poised on the edge of the blue and gold chair as though she was not at all sure it would sustain her weight. Must learn something about furniture, she resolved. This room’s Louis XIV, I think, she thought to herself, as she gazed around the room with quick glances while waiting for Madame Francine to continue.
“How’d you like to go with me to Paris next month to get new styles?”
Mimi came back to the subject at hand with a start. She gasped.
“Go with you to France?” she echoed.
“Certainement!” came the answer as Madame Francine remembered her French. “You speak French, don’t you? And you’ve a keen eye. And you can use your own head—your imagination. I’m not so young as I once was. It’s a real bother for me to chase around as I must—going to the shops, the races, the theatres and the opera, the smart hotels and restaurants, everywhere I can pick up ideas. You see, my dear, I always carry an artist with me who’s got a mind like the sensitive, so sensitive plate of a camera—he sees a gown or a hat and he never forgets a single detail until he has sketched it on paper.”
“I see,” murmured Mimi, though she didn’t see at all. Her mind was too filled with the prospect of going to Paris. But she must have made her reply sound interested and intelligent enough, for Francine went on.
“Only the department stores and wholesalers buy models—we only absorb ideas and then develop them ourselves. That’s why we can ask and get two hundred dollars and up for a gown while the department stores sell theirs for seventy-five.” In her voice there was a tinge, faint but unmistakable, of scorn when she spoke of “wholesalers” and “department stores.” So might have Marie Antoinette’s ladies-in-waiting have spoken of the common people. Or so might one of the war millionaires have spoken of one of his victims. Or an Englishman of anyone not an Englishman.
“We’ll sail the last week in December and we’ll be in Paris six weeks. I make two trips a year—June and December. I’ll introduce you over there and if you make good, I’ll let you go over for me at least once a year alone. …”
On and on she talked, of models and commissionaires, of going into some of the Paris shops as a potential purchaser to see all the models, remembering the best of them minutely for later reproduction or amplification. Usually the latter, for representatives of other New York establishments use the same tactics. She told of other tricks of the trade while Mimi devoted half of her mind to absorbing the flow of words and the other half to a study of Madame Francine.
This was the first time she had ever had time to gaze upon this magnificent, awe-inspiring creature so close at hand. Mimi, with her usual irreverence for the majestic, before which most others bowed the knee abjectly, could not refrain from the inward comment that Madame Francine, if subjected to a psychological test, would assay about forty percent sheer bluff, thirty percent knowledge of her business, and thirty percent sound common sense. She was tall, slender, simply clad in a close-fitting gown of grey. A string of amber beads and a touch of colour at the wrists accentuated the greyness of the dress and made its simple dignity all the more impressive. Her skin was of a milky whiteness, her eyes large and brown and placid, her hair of a rich brown beginning to fleck with grey. Exquisite, exuding elegance that made many of her customers of better birth feel at times awkward and boorish.
Only the nervous little jerks of her fingers revealed that her calm air was an acquired one, indicated the abundance of nervous energy beneath that calm which had enabled Madame Francine, who had been born Margaret O’Donnell, to reach the heights she had attained. But the Madame Francine who sat opposite Mimi had travelled a long way from the Irish immigrant girl who had looked with startled eyes upon the expanse of New York bay as she clutched feverishly the hand of her squat and unimaginative father. She must be fifty if she’s a day, Mimi reflected. No, that can’t be so. She’s been in business for over thirty years—she must be sixty. Anyway, the old girl’s certainly taken care of herself, Mimi decided, as she gave polite and reassuring answers to the questions which occasionally interrupted the even flow of Madame Francine’s narrative. …
“In the meantime, you’ll give up your workroom and spend most of your time with me. There are a lot of little points about the business you need to learn—I need a pair of strong, young shoulders on which to rest a part of my burdens”—here Madame Francine gave a gentle upward motion of her shoulders that would have convinced even a Parisian of her Gallicism—“and from all I can see, you’re the best one here to share these burdens with me.” …
For six weeks while the shops above them rushed through young mountains of work, making creations of all sorts for the Palm Beach migration of the socially and financially elect, Mimi and Madame Francine spent several hours together each day in the sheltered quietness of Madame Francine’s private office—“my studio” she called it. Mimi saw and met and heard about women and men whose names she had seen in society columns and in the smartest magazines but whom she had never seen in the flesh. She heard of the idiosyncrasies, the foibles, and the predilections of each of them. She learned the things each liked to hear. More important, she memorized the
