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There were the pretty American girls and their marvellously young-looking mammas, both out-Frenching the French in their efforts to look Parisian; there were rows of fat, placid, jewel-laden Argentine mothers, each with a watchful eye on her black-eyed, volcanically calm, be-powdered daughter; and there were the buyers, miraculously dressy in next week’s styles in suits and hats–of the old-girl type most of them, alert, self-confident, capable.

They usually returned to their hotels at six, limping a little, dog-tired; but at sight of the brightly lighted, gay hotel foyer they would straighten up like war-horses scenting battle and achieve an effective entrance from the doorway to the lift.

In all that big, busy foyer Sophy Gold herself was the one person distinctly out of the picture. One did not know where to place her. To begin with, a woman as irrevocably, irredeemably ugly as Sophy was an anachronism in Paris. She belonged to the gargoyle period. You found yourself speculating on whether it was her mouth or her nose that made her so devastatingly plain, only to bring up at her eyes and find that they alone were enough to wreck any ambitions toward beauty. You knew before you saw it that her hair would be limp and straggling.

You sensed without a glance at them that her hands would be bony, with unlovely knuckles.

The Fates, grinning, had done all that. Her Chicago tailor and milliner had completed the work. Sophy had not been in Paris ten minutes before she noticed that they were wearing ’em long and full. Her coat was short and her skirt scant. Her hat was small. The Paris windows were full of large and graceful black velvets of the Lillian Russell school.

“May I sit here?”

Sophy looked up into the plump, pink, smiling face of one of those very women of the buyer type on whom she had speculated ten minutes before–a good-natured face with shrewd, twinkling eyes. At sight of it you forgave her her skittish white-kid-topped shoes.

“Certainly,” smiled Sophy, and moved over a bit on the little French settee.

The plump woman sat down heavily. In five minutes Sophy was conscious she was being stared at surreptitiously. In ten minutes she was uncomfortably conscious of it. In eleven minutes she turned her head suddenly and caught the stout woman’s eyes fixed on her, with just the baffled, speculative expression she had expected to find in them. Sophy Gold had caught that look in many women’s eyes. She smiled grimly now.

“Don’t try it,” she said, “It’s no use.”

The pink, plump face flushed pinker.

“Don’t try–“

“Don’t try to convince yourself that if I wore my hair differently, or my collar tighter, or my hat larger, it would make a difference in my looks. It wouldn’t. It’s hard to believe that I’m as homely as I look, but I am. I’ve watched women try to dress me in as many as eleven mental changes of costume before they gave me up.”

“But I didn’t mean–I beg your pardon–you mustn’t think–“

“Oh, that’s all right! I used to struggle, but I’m used to it now. It took me a long time to realise that this was my real face and the only kind I could ever expect to have.”

The plump woman’s kindly face grew kinder.

“But you’re really not so–“

“Oh, yes, I am. Upholstering can’t change me. There are various kinds of homely women–some who are hideous in blue maybe, but who soften up in pink. Then there’s the one you read about, whose features are lighted up now and then by one of those rare, sweet smiles that make her plain face almost beautiful. But once in a while you find a woman who is ugly in any colour of the rainbow; who is ugly smiling or serious, talking or in repose, hair down low or hair done high–just plain dyed-in-the-wool, sewed-in-the-seam homely. I’m that kind. Here for a visit?”

“I’m a buyer,” said the plump woman.