"You don't even remember what your own husband looked like," said he. "Ah, Mary, Mary—don't dear me! I'm only dear when the court takes me up! But, egad," says he, setting her down on her feet, "you may wager these pretty ringlets of yours, I'm mighty dear for the gilded crew this time!"
Madame Radisson said she was glad of it; for when Pierre was rich they could take a fine house in the West End like my Lord So-and-So; but in the next breath she begged him not to call the Royalists a gilded crew.
"And who is this?" she asked, turning to me as the servants brought in candles.
"Egad, and you might have asked that before you tried to kiss him! You always did have a pretty choice, Mary! I knew it when you took me! That," says he, pointing to me, "that is the kite's tail!"
"But for convenience' sake, perhaps the kite's tail may have a name," retorts Madame Radisson.
"To be sure—to be sure—Stanhope, a young Royalist kinsman of yours."
"Royalist?" reiterates Mary Kirke with a world of meaning to the high-keyed question, "then my welcome was no mistake! Welcome waits Royalists here," and she gave me her hand to kiss just as an elderly woman with monster white ringlets all about her face and bejewelled fingers and bare shoulders and flowing draperies swept into the room, followed by a serving-maid and a page-boy. With the aid of two men, her daughter, a serving-maid, and the page, it took her all of five minutes by the clock to get herself seated. But when her slippered feet were on a Persian rug and the displaced ringlets of her monster wig adjusted by the waiting abigail and smelling-salts put on a marquetry table nearby and the folds of the gown righted by the page-boy, Lady Kirke extended a hand to receive our compliments. I mind she called Radisson her "dear, sweet savage," and bade him have a care not to squeeze the stones of her rings into the flesh of her fingers.
"As if any man would want to squeeze such a ragbag o' tawdry finery and milliners' tinsel," said Radisson afterward to me.
I, being younger, was "a dear, bold fellow," with a tap of her fan to the words and a look over the top of it like to have come from some saucy jade of sixteen.
After which the serving-maid must hand the smelling-salts and the page-boy haste to stroke out her train.