CHAPTER V

SUCCESS

“I declare you’re real pretty to-night, honey,” remarked Miss Polly from the floor, where she knelt pinning up the hem of a black serge skirt she was making for Gabriella.  “Some days you’re downright plain, and then you flame out just like a lamp.  Nobody would ever think to look at you that you’d be thirty-seven years old to-morrow.”  For it was the evening before Gabriella’s birthday, and she was at the end of her thirty-sixth year.

“I feel young,” she answered brightly, “and I feel happy.  The children are well, and I’ve had all the success I could ask.  Some day I’m going to own Madame’s business, Miss Polly.”

“I reckon she’s gettin’ mighty old, ain’t she?”

“She gave up the work years ago, and I believe she’d be glad to sell out to me to-morrow if I had the money.

“I wish you had.  It would be nice for you to be at the head, now wouldn’t it?” rejoined Miss Polly, speaking with difficulty through a mouthful of pins.

“Yes, I wish I had, but I’ve thought and thought, and I don’t see how I could borrow enough.  I’ve sometimes thought of asking Judge Crowborough to invest some money in the business.  It would be investing, the returns are so good.”

“He’d do it in a minute, I expect.  He always set a lot of store by you, didn’t he?”

“He used to, but somehow I hate to ask favours.”

“You were always a heap too proud.  Don’t you remember how you’d never eat the other children’s cake when you were a child unless you had some of your own to offer ’em?”

Gabriella laughed.  “No, I don’t remember, but it sounds like me.  I was horrid.”

“There was always a hard streak somewhere down in you, and you don’t mind my sayin’ that you ain’t gettin’ any softer, Gabriella.  There are times now when your mouth gets a set look like your Aunt Becky Bollingbroke’s.  You don’t recollect her, I ’spose, but she never married.”

“Well, I married,” Gabriella flippantly reminded her; “so it can’t be that.”

Though the hard work of the last ten years had left its visible mark upon her, and she looked a little older, a little tired, a little worn, experience had added a rare spiritual beauty to her face, and she was far handsomer than she had been at twenty.  The rich sprinkling of silver in the heavy waves of hair over her ears framed the firm pale oval of her face with a poetic and mysterious darkness, and gave depth and softness to her brilliant eyes.  For the struggle, which had stolen her first freshness and left faintly perceptible lines in her expressive face, had not robbed her of the eyes and the heart of a girl.

“I don’t count George, somehow,” retorted Miss Polly.  “That wan’t like marryin’ a real man, you know, and, when all’s said and done, a lone woman gets mighty hard and dried up.”

“But I can’t marry when there’s nobody to marry me,” laughed Gabriella.  “I haven’t seen a man for seven years except in the street or occasionally in the shop.  Men have either passed me by without seeing me or they have wanted to sell me something.”