"Not content with being mis-shapen, they are idiots to boot."
Her anger seemed to amuse the Bongo ladies immensely, but I am bound to say that their hilarity did not improve their personal appearance. Their three beaks moving convulsively, their under lips clicking against the upper ones, and the noise caused thereby, produced a most grotesque effect, and when we saw and heard them laughing, we fairly roared.
Miss Poles, however, did nothing of the sort, for the more we laughed the more angry she grew, and she would have ended by giving dire offence to both the chief and his wives, if Delange had not stepped in to the rescue by sending Nassar into the outer room for the presents which we had brought with us.
We lost no time in unfolding our Parisian treasures, consisting of cheap photographs, marionettes, dolls and their houses, and toy farm-yards. These playthings, which were just the very things to take the fancy of any African negress, gave immense pleasure to the women whose rising anger we wished to allay. They forgot Miss Poles and her indignation at once, and having, after desperate efforts, succeeded in standing up, they waddled towards the toys with childish glee, holding out their hands for the presents like overgrown babies.
Miss Poles, who had been meditating some terrible revenge, now produced a pocket looking-glass and held it suddenly before one of the women, fancying, undoubtedly, that the wretched creature, brought face to face with her deformity, would recoil with horror. Nothing of the kind. The woman's eyes danced with delight, her lips burlesqued a smile, and, to crown all, the huge mass of flesh began to wriggle about, for all the world like a penguin in a fit.
"Do you mean to say that she thinks herself pretty?" exclaimed Miss
Poles.
"Certainly," said Delange. "And I am quite willing to confess that I think she is so in her way, just as you, Miss Poles, are in yours."
Miss Beatrice shrugged her shoulders and was about to put her glass in her pocket again, when the Bongo woman seized hold of it with both hands, and declined to give it up.
"I will not give it to you," cried Miss Poles. "You have done quite enough in the way of insult by mistaking me for a man, without stealing my looking-glass. Give it up directly, I say. Do you think that I would inflict on a glass, accustomed to my features, the torture of reflecting yours?"
But the woman, who, naturally, did not understand a single syllable of this address, continued to pull her hardest, and things were once more beginning to look serious, when Delange again came to the rescue.