The description made a picture for Rose.  She saw the faded pathetic prettiness of the woman who’d looked too long and had been trying to pretend for the last fifteen years or so that she didn’t care.  And the picture in her mind’s eye was surmounted by a hat; a hat that conceded some of the years Miss Gibbons had insisted on, and that her client was unwilling to acknowledge, and yet retained a sort of jauntiness.

She didn’t know whether she could execute the thing she saw or not, out of the stock of materials at her disposal.  But it hadn’t cost her a thought or an effort to see the hat.

“All right,” she said after a bit.  “I’ll see what I can do.  If you’ll show me where the things are ...”

It was a much humbler sort of job, of course, designing a hat for a middle-aged village spinster, than making those dozen gowns for Goldsmith and Block had been.  But this consideration never occurred to her.  She found, and was not even amazed to find, the same thrill of exhilaration in conquering the small problem, that she had found in the larger one.  She worked with the same swift unconscious economy of labor and materials.

At the end of two hours, she presented the result of her labors for the milliner’s approval.

Miss Gibbons surveyed it with a smile of ironic appreciation.

“It isn’t what I’d call a real finished job,” she commented after a minute inspection of some of the details of Rose’s sewing.  “I wouldn’t trust it in a high wind not to scatter all the way from here to the Presbyterian church.  But it will certainly suit Agatha Stebbins.”

She looked at it a while longer.  “And I don’t know,” she concluded a little reluctantly, “as it’ll look so all-mighty foolish on her, either.  Will ten dollars a week suit you to begin on?”

“Yes,” said Rose, “that will suit me very well indeed.”

“All right,” said Miss Gibbons.  “That’s settled.  There’s one more thing to settle now, and that’s where you’re going to live.”

Rose contemplated this question a little blankly for a moment.

“Do you suppose,” she said, “there’s any place in this town where I can live; where they’d take a person like me?  Or would it be all right, if you asked them?”

“Oh, I guess,” said Miss Gibbons, “we could most likely find somebody.  I’ll think about it.”

She gave Rose some work to do and didn’t refer to the matter again till nearly six o’clock.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said then, “that I’ve got room for a boarder myself.  There’s a little room back here that I don’t use; there’s a black girl does me out and cooks my dinner and supper, and I get my own breakfast.  The girl could cook for two as well as one, and I guess I could feed you for two dollars a week.  If that ain’t satisfactory, you can just say so.”

“Satisfactory!” said Rose, and once more her voice broke.

“All right,” said Miss Gibbons hastily, “we’ll say no more about it.  That’s settled.  I’ll send the girl to the hotel to get your bags.”