And there were other things she learned too—phases of the business which she had never suspected before, marooned as she had been in the workrooms. Had she gossiped more with the girls, she reflected, she would have known these things sooner. She learned the names of the men customers whose wives and whose mistresses both purchased their gowns at Francine’s. And she was properly impressed with the necessity of never—never—permitting any mix-ups in the delivery of gowns or hats. She learned the necessary precautions in advising the bookkeepers about the bills for these goods—which bill was to be sent to the man’s home and which to his office, marked “Personal.”
Too, she was admitted to the secret of the victimizing of these men both by their wives and their mistresses. She heard Madame Francine explain suavely how many of the wives, permitted unlimited charge accounts at as many shops as they chose, were given little cash by their husbands. Madame Francine answered Mimi’s guileless question why husbands with money to give did not give it to their wives with a knowing little laugh. “Wives with too much money to spend might—with interesting young men around—well, they might forget they’re wives.” Mimi listened with amazement as Madame Francine told her how the wives—and the mistresses—frequently came and bought gowns costing three hundred dollars for which a bill was sent to the man for four hundred.
“And what becomes of the extra hundred?” Mimi asked.
“We give that in cash to the customer, little innocent! … What will happen if we don’t? They’ll go to another shop and we’ll have lost a customer.”
Despite all she had undergone, Mimi realized that she knew pitifully little about the ways of the world. Duplicity, deceit, lying, dishonesty, all around her and she had never even suspected it. I am a silly little innocent, she mused. In a flash Whitman’s lines came back to her:
“Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
Of myself for ever reproaching myself (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?) …”
She was faithless and foolish. If she weren’t she’d drop the whole thing and get herself a job scrubbing floors, washing dishes, anything rather than be a willing part of this sort of trickery. But even as she scourged herself and despised herself for her weakness, she knew she wouldn’t scrub floors or wash dishes. There’s Jean to think of, was her dominant thought. But she resolved she’d get out of the whole business and work at home when she had earned and saved the money she must have. Miss Lawrence had done it and some of her customers had followed her all the way to Negro Harlem. She could do it too—perhaps open a shop of her own as Sylvia had done.
She was glad she had done nothing so foolish when a few days after Christmas she stood on deck and watched the serrated skyline of New York, clad mistily in a blanket of snow that fell like a great celestial curtain, drop silently in the distance. The thrill and mystery of departure no longer of interest to her, Madame Francine had already gone to her stateroom, while Percival Edwards, the sketch artist, had fallen an easy victim to seasickness before the hawsers had been cast off and the huge ship had nosed its way from its slip. The long, dark pier with its distinctive odour of things nautical, the crowds of passengers and of others who had come to bid them a snowy and chilly farewell, the trim officers of the luxurious vessel that seemed so immense—Mimi felt an immediate sense of security replacing her fear of the sea, all these excited and delighted Mimi. Only in short trips of a few hours on the Gulf of Mexico before they had left New Orleans had Mimi ever before been on a ship. Those little boats of her childhood could have been stored away and forgotten in the hold of this huge boat, she reflected, as the shore became fainter and fainter in the greyish white curtain of snowflakes. She drew her shoulders deeper into the collar of her fur coat until there was but a thin slit of creamy flesh visible between the collar and the tight-fitting little toque that covered her head. This is life, she thought comfortably. A big liner, Paris, the boulevards, the shops, the theatres, the opera, the restaurants, all the life of la plus belle ville du monde—the phrase came to her from the textbook she had used but a short time before. …
Even Madame Francine’s at times crotchety querulousness and Percival Edward’s effeminacy could not ruffle her spirits in Paris—it was all too marvellous, too intoxicatingly beautiful, that she was at last in the one place she had always dreamed of visiting. The torn and unkempt streets could not destroy her happiness—“c’est la guerre,” she heard on every side, but for her there was no destroyed beauty—she saw beyond the disorder and envisioned the city as it was before shells and neglect had ruffled its beauty. She loved the reviving splendour and gaiety of fashionable life, loved it so well that Madame Francine was forced several times to remind her not too gently that she was in Paris for work and not as a lady of leisure. These reminders brought her back to herself for a time but soon her thoughts were again far from sketching frocks or absorbing ideas. All too soon for her the six weeks one by one began and ended, one after the other. She did not want to return to America. She wanted to stay forever in Paris. She would do it, she promised herself, with the recklessness of those infatuated with the charm of a place
