CHAPTER IV.
THE DREAM AND THE YEARS In one of the small fitting-rooms, divided by red velvet curtains on gilt rods from the long showrooms of Madame Dinard, a nervous group, comprising the head skirt fitter, the head waist fitter, Miss Bellman, the head saleswoman, and Madame herself, stood disconsolately around the indignant figure of Mrs.Weederman Pletheridge, who, attired in one of Madame's costliest French models, was gesticulating excitedly in the centre of four standing mirrors.

For three years Mrs.Pletheridge had lived in Paris, and her return to New York, and to the dressmaking establishments of Fifth Avenue, was an event which had shaken Dinard's, if not the fashionable street in which it stood, to its foundations.
"I don't know what is the matter with it," she said fussily, "but it doesn't suit me, and yet it looked so well in the hand.

I wonder if I could wear it if you were to take out some of this fulness, and change the set of the sleeves?
The fashions this spring are perfectly hopeless." "Why, it suits you to perfection, Madame.

Just a stitch or two like this--and this--and it will look as if it were designed for you by Worth.

Is it not so, Miss Bellman?
Don't you think it is wonderful on Madame ?" Miss Bellman, having learned her part, agreed effusively, and then each of the fitters, as she was appealed to in turn, contributed an enraptured assent to the discussion.