If Madame, starting penniless, had nevertheless contrived, through her native abilities, to support three husbands and six children, surely the capable and industrious Gabriella might assume smaller burdens with the certainty of moderate success.

It was not, when one considered it, the life which one would have chosen, but who, since the world began, had ever lived exactly the life of his choice?
Many women, she reflected stoically, were far worse off than she, since she started not only with a modicum of business experience (for surely the three months with Brandywine & Plummer might weigh as that) but with a knowledge of the world and a social position which she had found to be fairly marketable.
That Madame Dinard would have accepted an unknown and undistinguished applicant for work at a salary of fifteen dollars a week she did not for an instant imagine.

This inadequate sum, she concluded with a touch of ironic humour, represented the exact value in open market of her marriage to George.
In the front room, where a sparse mid-winter collection of hats ornamented the scattered stands, she stopped for a few minutes to inspect, with a critical eye, the dingy array.

"I wonder what makes them buy so many they can't sell ?" she said half aloud to the model at which she was gazing.

"Nobody would wear these hats--certainly nobody who could afford to buy Parisian models.