I couldn't
help thinking that the years when Lena literally hadn'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. Maybe she
would be carrying home a bunch of jonquils or a hyacinth plant.
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