Up in the work-room of a great dress-making establishment were heaps of delicate cambric, Victoria lawn, piques, muslins, piles of frillings, Hamburg edgings, insertions, bands.  Machines were tripping and buzzing; cutters were clipping at the tables; the forewoman was moving about, directing here, hurrying there, reproving now and then for some careless tension, rough fastening, or clumsy seam.  Out of it all were resulting lovely white suits; delicate, cloud-like, flounced robes of bewitching tints; graceful morning wrappers,—­perfect toilets of all kinds for girls at watering-places and in elegant summer homes.

Orders kept coming down from the mountains, up from the sea-beaches, in from the country seats, where gay, friendly circles were amusing away the time, and making themselves beautiful before each others’ eyes.

For it was fearfully hot again this year.

Bel Bree did not care.  It all amused her.  She had not got worn down yet, and she did not live in a cheap, working-girls’ boarding-house.  She had had radishes that morning with her bread and butter, and a little of last year’s fruit out of a tin can for supper the night before.  That was the way Miss Bree managed about peaches.  I believe that was the way she thought the petition in the Litany was answered,—­“Preserve to our use the kindly fruits of the earth, that in due time we may enjoy them;” after the luckier people have had their fill, and begun on the new, and the cans are cheap.  There are ways of managing things, even with very little money.  If you pay for the managing, you have to do without the things.  Bel and her aunt together, with their united earnings and their nice, cosy ways, were very far from being uncomfortable.  Bel said she liked the pinch,—­what there was of it.  She liked “a little bit brought home in a paper and made much of.”

Bel had been just a fortnight in the city.  She had gone right to work with her aunt at Fillmer & Bylles, she was bright and quick, knew how to run a “Wilcox & Gibbs,” and had “some perception,” the forewoman said, grimly; with a delicate implication that some others had not.  Miss Tonker’s praises always pared off on one side what they put on upon another.

It had taken Bel a fortnight to feel her ground, and to get exactly the “lay of the land.”  Then she went to work, unhesitatingly, to set some small things right.

This morning she had hurried herself and her aunt, come early, and put Miss Bree down, resolutely, against all her disclaimers, in a corner of the very best window in the room.  To do this, she moved Matilda Meane’s sewing-machine a little.