The Trimmed Lamp | Page 6

thrush.
Suffused in the aura of this high social refinement and good breeding, it
was impossible for her to escape a deeper effect of it. As good habits
are said to be better than good principles, so, perhaps, good manners
are better than good habits. The teachings of your parents may not keep
alive your New England conscience; but if you sit on a straigh-back
chair and repeat the words "prisms and pilgrims" forty times the devil
will flee from you. And when Nancy spoke in the Van Alstyne Fisher
tones she felt the thrill of noblesse oblige to her very bones.
There was another source of learning in the great departmental school.
Whenever you see three or four shop-girls gather in a bunch and jingle
their wire bracelets as an accompaniment to apparently frivolous
conversation, do not think that they are there for the purpose of
criticizing the way Ethel does her back hair. The meeting may lack the
dignity of the deliberative bodies of man; but it has all the importance
of the occasion on which Eve and her first daughter first put their heads
together to make Adam understand his proper place in the household. It
is Woman's Conference for Common Defense and Exchange of
Strategical Theories of Attack and Repulse upon and against the World,
which is a Stage, and Man, its Audience who Persists in Throwing
Bouquets Thereupon. Woman, the most helpless of the young of any
animal--with the fawn's grace but without its fleetness; with the bird's
beauty but without its power of flight; with the honey-bee's burden of
sweetness but without its- -Oh, let's drop that simile--some of us may
have been stung.
During this council of war they pass weapons one to another, and

exchange stratagems that each has devised and formulated out of the
tactics of life.
"I says to 'im," says Sadie, "ain't you the fresh thing! Who do you
suppose I am, to be addressing such a remark to me? And what do you
think he says back to me?"
The heads, brown, black, flaxen, red, and yellow bob together; the
answer is given; and the parry to the thrust is decided upon, to be used
by each thereafter in passages-at-arms with the common enemy, man.
Thus Nancy learned the art of defense; and to women successful
defense means victory.
The curriculum of a department store is a wide one. Perhaps no other
college could have fitted her as well for her life's ambition--the drawing
of a matrimonial prize.
Her station in the store was a favored one. The music room was near
enough for her to hear and become familiar with the works of the best
composers--at least to acquire the familiarity that passed for
appreciation in the social world in which she was vaguely trying to set
a tentative and aspiring foot. She absorbed the educating influence of
art wares, of costly and dainty fabrics, of adornments that are almost
culture to women.
The other girls soon became aware of Nancy's ambition. "Here comes
your millionaire, Nancy," they would call to her whenever any man
who looked the role approached her counter. It got to be a habit of men,
who were hanging about while their women folk were shopping, to
stroll over to the handkerchief counter and dawdle over the cambric
squares. Nancy's imitation high-bred air and genuine dainty beauty was
what attracted. Many men thus came to display their graces before her.
Some of them may have been millionaires; others were certainly no
more than their sedulous apes. Nancy learned to discriminate. There
was a window at the end of the handkerchief counter; and she could see
the rows of vehicles waiting for the shoppers in the street below. She
looked and perceived that automobiles differ as well as do their owners.

Once a fascinating gentleman bought four dozen handkerchiefs, and
wooed her across the counter with a King Cophetua air. When he had
gone one of the girls said:
"What's wrong, Nance, that you didn't warm up to that fellow. He looks
the swell article, all right, to me."
"Him?" said Nancy, with her coolest, sweetest, most impersonal, Van
Alstyne Fisher smile; "not for mine. I saw him drive up outside. A 12 H.
P. machine and an Irish chauffeur! And you saw what kind of
handkerchiefs he bought--silk! And he's got dactylis on him. Give me
the real thing or nothing, if you please."
Two of the most "refined" women in the store--a forelady and a
cashier--had a few "swell gentlemen friends" with whom they now and
then dined. Once they included Nancy in an invitation. The dinner took
place in a spectacular cafe whose tables are engaged for New Year's
eve a year in advance. There were two "gentlemen friends"-- one
without any hair