Page:Minnie's Bishop and Other Stories (1915).djvu/68

 held up or conducted without the knowledge of the head of the department.

When Onnie had finished her questions, I began mine, and I heard a very interesting story. It began with the adventures of a girl who did odd jobs of sewing for a man who specialised in the manufacture of cheap shirt waists. It went on with an account of the struggles of a junior assistant taken on one Christmastime to assist at the "notions" counter. It reached at last the daily life of Miss Honoria Dever, head of the costume department, responsible for the fashion of the clothes of half of the smartest women in the city—leader and commander of a regiment of some thirty young women, all bound to sell, to fit, to advise, to sew—even, I imagine, to dress as Miss Honoria bade them.

She told me the salary she earned; and I, dividing her dollars by five, assured her that no man who lived anywhere round the shores of our bay—not the doctor; not the lawyer; not the priest—was earning so much as she was. Then she confided to me that she had not reached yet the end of her career. There were heights to be climbed.

There are buyers who visit New York in the season when the form and colour of clothes are decided on by the ultimate, remote authorities who settle these things. There are buyers who go out from New York itself to London and Paris, crossing the Atlantic once or twice a year, who, by virtue of some strange instinct for raiment, can be trusted to