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THE TRIMMED LAMP
 

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, Nance,” they would call to her whenever any man who looked the rôle 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

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