It was the cowslips, though they were but artifice, which had set her active brain thus suddenly and idly day-dreaming. They had brought her back with a rush to the old farm where she had been born and brought up. The whole surroundings of her exile had vanished. She was no longer in the big, bare, stuffy, untidy workroom at the back of Madame Eglantine’s celebrated Paris hat shop: in the centre of snippets and straws, feathers, fringes, flowers and other fashionable fripperies; under the glare of the skylight; with the patter and gabble of French voices, the click of scissors, the long-drawn sighs or quick pants of energetic stitching, the rustle of crumpled silks, in her ears, and in her nostrils the indescribable atmosphere of the atélier, as it was called. An apartment hermetically sealed to the outer airs, save what might penetrate of them through the opening of its doors; redolent of the gums of artificial flowers, of last year’s and this morning’s succulent cookery—Monsieur Ildefonse, the husband of Madame Eglantine, liked a point of garlic in most dishes—and of the faint sickly scents of hair powder and fine lady’s perfumes which hung about the whole establishment. There were other odours in the workroom besides, of which the less said the better. It was little wonder that Pamela Pounce should now and again feel her splendid vitality slacken; that she should have considerably fined down from a country buxomness since she had joined Madame Eglantine’s staff.
But the bunch of cowslips had brought her away—far away from it all for a blissful moment.
She was back again at home. The exquisite freshness of an early summer morning on the Kentish downs encompassed her. Her young bosom lifted with ecstasy. Oh! the breath of England: pungent of the sea, sweet of the moorland herbs, free from the hills and whispering of the woods, was there ever anything like it? There was a fragrance of breadmaking too from mother’s oven, and a lovely reek of burning weeds where father was busy over the potato fields!
Pamela started. A voice, sharp as a pen-knife, had recalled her to reality.
“Ah, Meess”—she went by no other name in this French servitude, either from her employer or her sister workers. It was an unconscious tribute to a certain fine apartness of character, as well as to her British independence. “Ah, Meess,” cried Madame Eglantine, “is this how I find you? Asleep with your eyes open! My faith, is this how you conduct yourself in the thick of the business hours? And the Marquise who expects that hat by noon!”
Pamela opened her day-dreaming eyes full upon the speaker, gave an inaudible sigh and a small ironic smile. She did not start or blush or show any sign either of flurry or vexation at the acrid accent of the rebuke, she was too completely mistress of herself for that. Her hand hovered over the ribbon box; then with a decisive movement she nipped a shimmering purple roll and began to draw out its darkly radiant lengths.
“Purple!” ejaculated Madame Eglantine, surprised into a quite amiable tone; “purple for that blonde Marquise who is not yet twenty! And she means to wear all white muslins with lace in floods. Did I not tell you so? That ribbon I bought for Madame la Gouvernante—it is for dowagers——”
She broke off and stared.
Pamela had twisted and snipped and pinched and the hat was trimmed in what her famous patronne herself would have described as “un tour de main.” She now held it up on her balled hand, and turned it slowly from side to side.
“But it is a stroke of genius!” exclaimed the little Frenchwoman. She hated Pamela, but she was above all an artist. “No, no, do not touch it again, no one must touch it! You have a thousand times reason. Blue or green or pink—anyone with the ordinary mind would have blended me the banal pretty-pretty with those cowslips. The Marquise would have been but one of a score of shepherdesses, no more distinguished than a dragée box for a baptism! But now——”