“Now for you, angel,” she said, “Mamselle Thérèse would sew for next to nothing, but for them, the price is in the hundreds, sometimes in the thousands. It is an art, n’est-ce pas? Wouldn’t they pay ten thousand for a picture by Rousseau? Then why shouldn’t they pay ten thousand for a dress by Chanel? Mainbocher? Mamselle Thérèse don’t kid herself. She knows she isn’t in that class yet, but she works slow and sure like a mole. Five years from now Mamselle Thérèse will be in the movies like Adrian.”

Her ruling passion was business, and she could see nothing except in terms of its commercial value. Thus, when she learned that I had gone to a secretarial school, she said, “You must keep your eyes open and when the time comes, rush in and nab yourself a plum. Mamselle Thérèse’s advice to a young girl like you that has a good head on her shoulders is: be a secretary to a big-time lawyer. There’s the money! There’s the prestige! I’m telling you. What good are you doing yourself fooling around up here with that vieille furie when you could be on Fifth Avenue, New York? Mamselle Thérèse has a girl-friend working at Number One, Wall Street, on the thirty-fourth floor and she makes fifty dollars a week. I’m telling you.”

She talked ceaselessly in a hoarse whisper as if we were two business men making a slightly shady deal. Often she worked arithmetic problems with the tip of her finger on the polished table, so obsessed with the imposing figures of her last year’s state and federal income taxes that she did not leave off even when I warned her that her nails would scratch the finish. It was of no matter to her that I contributed nothing to the conversation but answered only with a monosyllable or a forced smile when she put such a rhetorical question to me as “Does Mamselle Thérèse know all the answers in the business world?” Her chief ambition was to receive a commission from visiting royalty; it deeply thrilled her to imagine some queen or princess finding, after she disembarked, that she had not brought enough evening gowns: “ ‘I must run right to Mamselle Thérèse. She will make me a chose merveilleuse for the White House ball.’ Wouldn’t Mamselle Thérèse be knocked off the Christmas tree?” Sometimes, impassioned by the memory of a gown that Mainbocher had executed for some foreign personage or by the contemplation of vast sums of money owed her by her “élite clientele” she would pursue me to my room, having given a peremptory order to Ethel as we left the dining-room, to bring our coffee to the third floor.