Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris & Mrs. Harris Goes to New York Read Free Page A

there enthralled, rapt, and enchanted, gazing at the dresses, leaning upon her mop, in her music-hall shoes, soiled overall, and wispy hair down about her ears, the classic figure of the cleaning woman.
    It was thus that Lady Dant found her when she happened to come in from her waiting room. ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed,‘my dresses!’ And then noting Mrs Harris’s attitude and the expression on her face said: ‘Do you like them? I haven’t made up my mind yet which one I am going to wear tonight.’
    Mrs Harris was hardly conscious that Lady Dant was speaking, she was still engrossed in these living creations of silks and taffetas and chiffons in heart-lifting colours, daring cut, and stiff with cunning internal construction so that they appeared to stand almost by themselves like creatures with a life of their own. ‘Coo,’ she gasped finally, ‘ain’t they beauties. I’ll bet they didn’t ’arf cost a packet.’
    Lady Dant had been unable to resist the temptation to impress Mrs Harris. London chars are not easily impressed, in fact they are the least impressionable people in the world. She had always been a little afraid of Mrs Harris and here was her chance to score. She laughed her brittle laugh and said: ‘Well, yes, in a way. This one here - “
lvoire
” - cost three hundred and fifty pounds and the big one, the red - it’s called “Ravishing” - came to around four hundred and fifty. I always go to Dior, don’t you think? Then, of course, you know you’re right.’
    ‘Four hundred and fifty quid,’ echoed Mrs Harris, ‘ ’ow would anyone ever get that much money?’ She was not unfamiliar with Paris styles, for she was an assiduous reader of old fashion magazines sometimes presented to her by clients, and she had heard of Fath, Chanel, and Balenciaga, Carpentier, Lanvin, and Dior, and the last named now rang a bell through her beauty-starved mind.
    For it was one thing to encounter photographs of dresses, leafing through the slick pages of
Vogue
or
Elle
where, whether in colour or black and white, they were impersonal and as out of her world and her reach as the moon or the stars. It was quite another to come face toface with the real article to feast one’s eyes upon its every clever stitch, to touch it, smell it, love it, and suddenly to become consumed with the fires of desire.
    Mrs Harris was quite unaware that in her reply to Lady Dant she had already given voice to a determination to possess a dress such as this. She had not meant ‘how would anyone find that much money?’ but ‘how would
I
find that much money?’ There, of course, was no answer to this, or rather only one. One would have to win it. But the chances of this were likewise as remote as the planets.
    Lady Dant was quite well pleased with the impression she seemed to have created and even took each one down and held it up to her so that Mrs Harris could get some idea of the effect. And since the char’s hands were spotless from the soap and water in which they were immersed most of the time, she let her touch the materials which the little drudge did as though it were the Grail.
    ‘Ain’t it loverly,’ she whispered again. Lady Dant did not know at that instant Mrs Harris had made up her mind that what she desired above all else on earth, and in Heaven thereafter, was to have a Dior dress of her own hanging in her cupboard.
    Smiling slyly, pleased with herself, Lady Dant shut the wardrobe door, but she could not shut out from the mind of Mrs Harris what she had seen there: beauty, perfection, the ultimate in adornment that a woman could desire. Mrs Harris was no less a woman than Lady Dant, or any other. She wanted, she wanted, she wanted a dress from what must be surely the most expensive shop in the world, that of Mr Dior in Paris.
    Mrs Harris was no fool. Not so much as a thought of ever wearing such a garment in public ever entered her head. If there was one thing Mrs Harris knew, it was herplace. She kept to it