Page:Biggers and Ritchie - Inside the Lines.djvu/216

   Delphic mysteries to charm the heart of woman—that lay scattered about upon the floor.

Jane sat back on her heels and surveyed the melting folds of satin with an artist's eye.

"If you only knew—what it means to me to get back with my baskets full of French beauties! Why, when I screwed up my courage two months ago to go to old Hildebrand and ask him to send me abroad as his buyer—I'd been studying drawing and French at nights for three years in preparation, you see—he roared like the dear old lion he is and said I was too young. But I cooed and pleaded, and at last he said I could come—on trial, and so"

"He'll purr like a pussy-cat when you get back," Lady Crandall put in, with a pat on the brown head at her knees.

"Maybe. If I can slip into New York with my little baskets while all the other buyers are still over here, cabling tearfully for money to get home or asking their firms to send a warship to fetch them—why, I guess the pennant's mine all right."

The eternal feminine, so strong in Iowa's