Sometimes in the
evening I would find her alone in her work-room, draping folds of satin on
a wire figure, with a quite blissful expression of countenance. I could
n't help thinking that the years when Lena literally had n't enough
clothes to cover herself might have something to do with her untiring
interest in dressing the human figure. Her clients said that Lena "had
style," and overlooked her habitual inaccuracies. She never, I discovered,
finished anything by the time she had promised, and she frequently spent
more money on materials than her customer had authorized. Once, when I
arrived at six o'clock, Lena was ushering out a fidgety mother and her
awkward, overgrown daughter. The woman detained Lena at the door to say
apologetically:--
"You'll try to keep it under fifty for me, won't you, Miss Lingard? You
see, she's really too young to come to an expensive dressmaker, but I knew
you could do more with her than anybody else."
"Oh, that will be all right, Mrs. Herron. I think we'll manage to get a
good effect," Lena replied blandly.
I thought her manner with her customers very good, and wondered where she
had learned such self-possession.
Sometimes after my morning classes were over, I used to encounter Lena
downtown, in her velvet suit and a little black hat, with a veil tied
smoothly over her face, looking as fresh as the spring morning.
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