IV + 

“I thought you’d be more enthusiastic,” said Flora. + 

“I am enthusiastic,” protested Jane. “It’s just that I’m not used to the idea yet⁠—” + 

They were sitting on the edge of Flora’s bed at the Belmont. The room was crowded with gaping trunks and strewn with the silk and satin confusion of Flora’s new winter wardrobe, fresh from the fingers of the Paris dressmakers. Flora, very chic and fair in a new sheath dress of black chiffon, was fastening on her slender wrist the first diamond wrist watch that Jane had ever seen. She was wearing the first slit skirt that Jane had ever seen, also. Jane could not keep her eyes off the unseemly exposure of Flora’s slender black legs. Flora had said they were wearing dresses like that in the streets of Paris. + 

“Be that as it may,” thought Jane, “in the streets of Chicago that skirt will look very queer.” + 

But Flora was only superficially preoccupied with slit skirts and wrist watches. She had been unfolding to Jane her plans for the winter. Jane wondered what her mother and Isabel would think of them. For those plans were very surprising. Flora, incredibly, was going to open a shop. A hat shop. And, of all places, in the old brownstone stable in the back yard on Rush Street. + 

“Lots of women are doing it in London,” said Flora. “I’ve got the duckiest French models and a very clever French vendeuse to help me. We’re going to make hats on the head, you know, just the way they do in Paris. I’m going to turn the coach-house into a showroom and make fitting-rooms out of the stalls. The workshop will be in the hayloft. Papa sold the Daimler last spring, and he thinks it would really be more convenient to use cabs this winter than buy a new one. I’m going to have a black-and-gold sign made to put over the door⁠—‘Chez Flora,’ in a facsimile of my own handwriting. And copy it for the tags inside the hats. That lid of yours is a fright, Jane. It looks almost like Silly’s. I bet you bought it in Boston. You must be my first customer.” + 

The hat did not look like Silly’s, thought Jane indignantly. Then, as she recovered from the passing insult, “Do you expect to make much money?” Jane had been thinking rather wistfully of money and of the difficulty of making it, since her dinner last night with Agnes. + 

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Flora easily. “I guess so. My expenses will be quite heavy. If I do I’ll give it away, of course.” + 

“To whom?” asked Jane. She was wondering already whether if she and Flora could get up a little trust fund for Agnes’s daughter, Agnes would consent to accept it. + 

“Oh⁠—to some charity. I haven’t thought which. My goodness, Jane, I don’t have to worry about that! The poor we have always with us. Mrs. Lester would be glad to grab it for her crippled children.” + 

“I see,” said Jane doubtfully. She was not at all sure that she did. She could not help feeling that Flora must have some very special reason for wanting to do anything so unusual and so unusually unpleasant as running a hat shop. Of course, if it were for charity⁠— + 

“I do think,” said Flora with conviction, “that a really chic hat shop is needed in Chicago. But the main thing is⁠—it will give me something to do.” + 

Across the brass hotel bedstead Jane looked at Flora. Her red-gold hair was just as shiny as ever, her figure was as slender and her eyes as brightly blue. She had never lost that look of the Dresden-china shepherdess. Was it just because Flora had never really done anything that she still seemed as delicate and fragile and fair as a precious piece of porcelain? Things had always been done to Flora. From the hour of her mother’s dreadful dishonoured death, her life had been swallowed up by her ageing father. He had carried her around an empty world, trying to fill its emptiness with her Dresden-china prettiness. She had summered in England and France and Germany and Switzerland. She had wintered in Italy and Egypt and India and Spain. She had opened and closed the brownstone house on Rush Street for innumerable brief Chicago seasons. But she had never settled down⁠—never really belonged anywhere, since the winter of Muriel’s marriage. There had been, of course, that incident in Cairo, eleven years ago, with that young Englishman with the unbelievably British name. Inigo Fellowes!⁠—that was it! Jane had had a letter from Flora⁠—such a happy letter⁠—confiding the secret of her engagement. And three weeks later a second letter, saying that Mr. Furness had been ill in Shepheard’s Hotel and that Flora had been very much worried about him, and that the engagement was broken and that Flora was going to take her father to the South of France for the spring. Jenny had been born two days after the arrival of the second letter. Jane had been too preoccupied to think much about it. She did not see Flora again for two years, and Flora had never mentioned Inigo’s name. And now Mr. Furness was seventy-nine years old and really too feeble to travel any longer. And Flora was thirty-seven and was going to open a hat shop in the brownstone stable in the back yard. + 

Jane thought she would much rather be as grey and as tired as Agnes and work in Macy’s advertising department and sleep in a black hole of Calcutta and nag a worthless husband and worry about a baby’s future than open a hat shop to give herself employment. + 

But she only answered: “Yes, of course it will, Flora. And I’d love to buy a hat. So will Isabel, I know. And Muriel and Rosalie.” She thought her encouragement sounded a trifle hollow, however, and changed the subject brightly. “Did you have fun this summer?” + 

“Yes,” said Flora absently. “We motored in Ireland. How was Gull Rocks? Pretty dull?” Then, without waiting for an answer, “Oh, Jane! Whom do you think I saw in London, just before I sailed?” + 

Jane couldn’t imagine. + 

“André Duroy!” cried Flora. “After all these years! In a picture gallery in New Bond Street. He recognized me. I should never have known him. He asked after you, Jane. I told him all about your children.” + 

Jane sat a moment in silence. + 

“What⁠—what was he like?” she ventured. + 

“Oh⁠—funny,” said Flora. “He’s gone frog. He had a little black beard and a wife who couldn’t speak English.” + 

“Nice-looking?” said Jane, after a pause. + 

“The beard or the wife?” questioned Flora. + 

“The wife,” said Jane. + 

“Oh, very pretty,” said Flora. “A mere child.” + 

Jane sat another moment in silence. She couldn’t think of any other question to ask and Flora evidently considered the subject finished. + 

“Let’s get some theatre tickets,” said Flora. “I’d like a gay evening.” + 

“So would I,” said Jane. She sprang up from the bed. “I’m here for a time and I mean to have it!” + 

Flora took down the telephone receiver and called the ticket broker. + 

“We’ll make Papa stand us to a magnificent dinner,” she said. + 

Jane did not answer. So André had gone frog and had a little black beard. It seemed only yesterday to Jane that she had noticed that André had begun to shave. And Cyprienne couldn’t speak English. She wondered if Flora had told him that Cicily was fourteen. Somehow she hoped that she hadn’t. + 