memory of Arthur and of her first love would rush over her.  Then she would see Arthur’s face, gentle, protective, tender, as it had looked on that last evening, and for an instant her lost girlhood and her girlhood’s dream would envelop her like the fragrance of flowers.  At such moments she thought of this love as tenderly as a mother might have thought of the exquisite dead face of an infant who had lived only an hour.  Though it was over, though it bore no part, with its elusive loveliness, in her practical plans for the future, this dream became gradually, as the years passed, the most radiant and vital thing in her life.  Though it was so vague as to be without warmth, it was as vivid and as real as light.  The knowledge that in the past she had known perfect love, even though in her blindness she had thrust it aside, was a balm which healed her wounds and gave her courage to go on, friendless and alone, into the loveless stretch of the future.  There was hardly a minute of her day for the next three years which was not sweetened by this hyacinth-scented dream of the past, there was hardly an hour of her drudgery which was not ennobled and irradiated by the splendour of this love that she had lost.

Of George—­even of George as the father of her children—­she rarely thought.  He had dropped out of her life like any other mistake, like any other illusion, and she was too sanguine by nature, too buoyant, too full of happiness and of energy, to waste herself on either mistakes or illusions.  During the months when she had waited for her freedom she had resolutely put the thought of him out of her mind, and when at last her divorce was granted, she dismissed the fact as completely as if it had not changed the entire course of her life.  The past was over, and only that part of it should live which contributed sweetness and beauty to the present—­only that part of it which she could use in the better and stronger structure of the future.  Whatever living meant in the end, she told herself each morning as she started out to her work, it must mean, not resignation, not inertia, but endeavour, enterprise, and courage.

CHAPTER IV

THE DREAM AND THE YEARS

In one of the small fitting-rooms, divided by red velvet curtains on gilt rods from the long showrooms of Madame Dinard, a nervous group, comprising the head skirt fitter, the head waist fitter, Miss Bellman, the head saleswoman, and Madame herself, stood disconsolately around the indignant figure of Mrs. Weederman Pletheridge, who, attired in one of Madame’s costliest French models, was gesticulating excitedly in the centre of four standing mirrors.  For three years Mrs. Pletheridge had lived in Paris, and her return to New York, and to the dressmaking establishments of Fifth Avenue, was an event which had shaken Dinard’s, if not the fashionable street in which it stood, to its foundations.

“I don’t know what is the matter with it,” she said fussily, “but it doesn’t suit me, and yet it looked so well in the hand.  I wonder if I could wear it if you were to take out some of this fulness, and change the set of the sleeves?  The fashions this spring are perfectly hopeless.”