Free Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris & Mrs. Harris Goes to New York by Paul Gallico

University. He was remembering a dark and dingy closet, dark-panelled, that had been his bedroom and study, cold and austere, opening off a dark hallway, and incongruously, as the picture formed in his mind, there was a pail standing in the hall at the head of the stairs.
    Mrs Harris’s alert little eyes now dared to engage those of the old gentleman. They penetrated the fierceness of his exterior, peering through the fringe of white hair and menacing eyebrows and the immaculate front of his clothing to a warmth that she felt within. She wondered what he was doing there, for his attitude of hands folded over a gold-headed cane was of one who was unaccompanied. Probably looking for a dress for his granddaughter, she thought and, as always, with her kind, resorted to the direct question to satisfy her curiosity. She did, however, as a gesture of benevolence advance the prospective recipient a generation.
    ‘Are you looking for a dress for your daughter?’ Mrs Harris inquired.
    The old man shook his head, for his children were I scattered and far removed. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘I come here from time to time because I like to see beautiful clothes and beautiful women. It refreshes me and makes me feel young again.’
    Mrs Harris nodded assent. ‘No doubt abaht that!’ she agreed. Then with the pleasant feeling that she had found someone else in whom she might confide she leaned towardshim and whispered: ‘I’ve come all the way from London to buy meself a Dior dress.’
    A flash of insight, half a Frenchman’s marvellous perspicacity, half the completion of the memory he had been trying to dredge up, illuminated the old gentleman, and he knew now who and what she was. The old picture of the dark-stained hallway and creaking stairs with the pail at the top, returned, but now a figure stood beside the bucket, a large slatternly woman in a bedraggled overall, outsize shoes, reddish-grey hair, and freckled skin, sole commander of battery of brooms, mops, dusters, and brushes. She had been for him the only cheerful note throughout the gloomy precincts of the college rooms.
    A slattern whose husband had deserted her, the sole support of five children, she exuded unfailing good humour and a kind of waspish but authentic and matter-of-fact philosophy sandwiched in between comments upon the weather, the government, the cost of living, and the vicissitudes of life ‘Tyke what you can get and don’t look no gift ’orse in the eye,’ was one of her sayings. He remembered that her name had been Mrs Maddox, but to him and another French boy in the college she had always been Madame Mops, and as such had been their friend, counsellor, bearer of tidings, source of gossip and intramural news.
    He remembered too that beneath the brash and comic exterior he had recognised the intrepid bravery of women who lived out lives of hardship and ceaseless toil to render their simple duties to their own, leavened with no more than the sprinkling of the salt of minor grumbling, and acid commentary upon the scoundrels and scallywags who ran things. He could see her again now, the reddish-grey hair hanging down about her eyes, a cigarette tucked behind one ear, her head bobbing with concentrated energy as shecharred the premises. He could almost hear her speak again. And then realised that he
had
.
    For seated next to him in the most exclusive and sophisticated dress salon in Paris, was the reincarnation of his Madame Mops of half a century ago.
    True there was no physical resemblance, for his neighbour was slight and worn thin by work - the old gentleman’s eyes dropping to her hands confirmed the guess - but that was not how he recognised her; it was by the bearing, the speech, of course, and the naughty little eyes, but above all by the aura of indomitable courage and independence and impudence that surrounded her.
    ‘A Dior dress,’ he echoed her - ‘a splendid idea. Let us hope that you will find here this afternoon what you