He leaned forward in his chair, a queer half-smile on his face.

“I’ll give you your chance,” he said, “for one month.  At the end of that time I’ll send for you.  I’m not going to watch you.  I’m not going to have you watched.  Of course your sale slips will show the office whether you’re selling goods or not.  If you’re not they’ll discharge you.  But that’s routine.  What do you want to sell?”

“What do I want to—­Do you mean—­Why, I want to sell the lacy things.”

“The lacy—­”

Ray, very red-cheeked, made the plunge.  “The—­the lawnjeree, you know.  The things with ribbon and handwork and yards and yards of real lace.  I’ve seen ’em in the glass case in the French Room.  Seventy-nine dollars marked down from one hundred.”

The superintendent scribbled on a card.  “Show this Monday morning.  Miss Jevne is the head of your department.  You’ll spend two hours a day in the store school of instruction for clerks.  Here, you’re forgetting your glove.”

The grey look had settled down on him again as he reached out to press the desk button.  Ray Willets passed out at the door opposite the one through which Rachel Wiletzky had entered.

Some one in the department nick-named her Chubbs before she had spent half a day in the underwear and imported lingerie.  At the store school she listened and learned.  She learned how important were things of which Halsted Street took no cognisance.  She learned to make out a sale slip as complicated as an engineering blueprint.  She learned that a clerk must develop suavity and patience in the same degree as a customer waxes waspish and insulting, and that the spectrum’s colours do not exist in the costume of the girl-behind-the-counter.  For her there are only black and white.  These things she learned and many more, and remembered them, for behind the rosy cheeks and the terrier-bright eyes burned the indomitable desire to get on.  And the finished embodiment of all of Ray Willets’ desires and ambitions was daily before her eyes in the presence of Miss Jevne, head of the lingerie and negligees.

Of Miss Jevne it might be said that she was real where Ray was artificial, and artificial where Ray was real.  Everything that Miss Jevne wore was real.  She was as modish as Ray was shabby, as slim as Ray was stocky, as artificially tinted and tinctured as Ray was naturally rosy-cheeked and buxom.  It takes real money to buy clothes as real as those worn by Miss Jevne.  The soft charmeuse in her graceful gown was real and miraculously draped.  The cobweb-lace collar that so delicately traced its pattern against the black background of her gown was real.  So was the ripple of lace that cascaded down the front of her blouse.  The straight, correct, hideously modern lines of her figure bespoke a real eighteen-dollar corset.  Realest of all, there reposed on Miss Jevne’s bosom a bar pin of platinum and diamonds—­very real diamonds set in a severely plain but very real bar of precious platinum.  So if you except Miss Jevne’s changeless colour, her artificial smile, her glittering hair and her undulating head-of-the-department walk, you can see that everything about Miss Jevne was as real as money can make one.