Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris & Mrs. Harris Goes to New York by Paul Gallico Read Free Book Online Page A

important producer coming for drinks here tomorrow. You charwomen are all alike. Never think of anybody but yourselves. I do think, after all I’ve done for you, you might show me a little consideration.’
    For a moment, in extenuation, Mrs Harris was tempted to reveal where she was off to and why - and resisted. The love affair between herself and the Dior dress was private. Instead she said soothingly: ‘Now, now, ducks, no need for you to get shirty. Me friend, Mrs Butterfield, will look in on you on her way home tomorrow and give the place a good tidying up. Your producer friend won’t know the difference. Well, dearie, ’ere’s ’oping ’e gives you a good job,’ she concluded cheerily and left Miss Penrose glowering and sulking.

A LL thoughts of the actress, and for that matter all of her meandering back into the past, were driven out of Mrs Harris’s head when with a jerk and a squeal of brakes the cab came to a halt at what must be her destination.
    The great grey building that is the House of Christian Dior occupies an entire corner of the spacious Avenue Montaigne leading off the Rond-Point of the Champs-Élysées. It has two entrances, one off the Avenue proper which leads through the Boutique where knick-knacks and accessories are sold at prices ranging from five to a hundred pounds, and another more demure and exclusive one.
    The cab driver chose to deposit Mrs Harris at the latter, reserved for the genuinely rich clientele, figuring his passenger to be at the very least an English countess or milady. He charged her no more than the amount registered on the clock and forbore to tip himself more than fifty francs, mindful of the warning of the Airways man. Then crying to her gaily the only English he knew, which was - ‘ ’Ow do you do,’ he drove off leaving her standing on the sidewalk before the place that had occupied heryearnings and dreams and ambitions for the past three years.
    And a strange misgiving stirred in the thin breast beneath the brown twill coat. It was no store at all, like Selfridges in Oxford Street, or Marks and Spencer’s where she did her shopping, not a proper store at all, with windows for display and wax figures with pearly smiles and pink cheeks, arms outstretched in elegant attitudes to show off the clothes that were for sale. There was nothing, nothing at all, but some windows shaded by ruffled grey curtains, and a door with an iron grille behind the glass. True, in the keystone above the arch of the entrance were chiselled the words CHRISTIAN DIOR , but no other identification.
    When you have desired something as deeply as Mrs Harris had longed for her Paris dress, and for such a time, and when at last that deep-rooted feminine yearning is about to taste the sweetness of fulfilment, every moment attending its achievement becomes acute and indelibly memorable.
    Standing alone now in a foreign city, assailed by the foreign roar of foreign traffic and the foreign bustle of foreign passers-by, outside the great, grey mansion that was like a private house and not a shop at all, Mrs Harris suddenly felt lonely, frightened, and forlorn, and in spite of the great roll of silver-green American dollars in her handbag she wished for a moment that she had not come, or that she had asked the young man from the Airlines to accompany her, or that the taxi driver had not driven away leaving her standing there.
    And then, as luck would have it, a car from the British Embassy drove by and the sight of the tiny Union Jack fluttering from the mudguard stiffened her spine and brought determination to her mouth and eyes. She reminded herself who and what she was, drew in a deep breath of the balmyParis air laced with petrol fumes, and resolutely pushed open the door and entered.
    She was almost driven back by the powerful smell of elegance that assailed her once she was inside. It was the same that she smelled when Lady Dant opened the doors to her wardrobe, the same that clung to the fur