She paused and waved her hands before the delight of the mental picture. A small, dusky woman with very bright eyes and extraordinarily swift movements, she was like some quick furry animal of the mouse tribe; a greater contrast to the fair, large, composed English girl could hardly be imagined; yet on one point these two were singularly akin. Both were geniuses in the same restricted yet fascinating realm of art.
If there were a creature on earth capable of stepping straight off into the shoes of Madame Eglantine, first milliner in the world of Fashion, it was Pamela Pounce, the British yeoman’s daughter!
Perhaps it was this consciousness of her rival’s merits which made the Frenchwoman, while too acute of intellect not to recognise them, regard her clever apprentice with feelings which approached detestation. Yet she was soon to find another cause.
“I’d better put in the stitches myself, I suppose, M’dame?” said Pamela tranquilly. She spoke French fluently by this time, with a pronounced if not unpleasing British accentuation. “The young ladies are so fond of sewing things to death. It’s like a hand on pastry,” she went on meditatively, as she bit her thread, and flung a cool, tantalising glance at the irate ring of countenances about her. “You have, or you haven’t got it, and no one to blame.”
“That will do, Meess. There is too much conversation here, Mademoiselle Panache!” Madame hopped spitefully from Pamela upon the directress, who, sitting large, square and sallow at the centre table, dispensing materials, had permitted herself a gratified smile over the snubbing of the English girl. For a moment or two there was silence in the over-lighted, under-ventilated apartment. The season was early July; a blazing white sunshine was pouring down through the casements which their muffed glass but feebly mitigated.
Then the little angry, sharp-toothed mouse that was the bland, coaxing, fluent Eglantine of the showroom found a fresh grievance.
“My God, Mademoiselle Anatoline, are you making a bouquet or tying bristles on a broomstick? And Heaven pardon me, Mademoiselle Eulalie, but if those hands of yours have been washed since—since—— What have you been doing with those hands, ma fille? Blacking the boots or scratching your head?”
Anatoline, who was large and fat and fair, became an apoplectic purple; and Eulalie, who was the colour of a lemon with hair like a raven’s wing, turned a shade more livid than nature had made her.
There was a titter, beginning sycophantically upon the lips of Mademoiselle Panache. But Pamela’s smooth face, white where it was not delicately carnation, might have been that of a handsomely tinted statue. She cut her thread, tweaked one of the shimmering purple loops, and once again putting the hat on her clenched hand, gave it a little shake. The creation was complete!
Madame’s swift beady eye rolled in her direction.