“Give yourself the trouble to bring that upstairs to the showroom, Meess,” she ordered. “Madame D’Aimargues said she would call, herself, before midday, to try it on before it was sent. I will join you presently and you had better remain, in case there were required an alteration.”
“Bien, M’dame,” Pamela responded with some alacrity. She might get a whiff of good open air as she went up the stairs. There might even be a window ajar in the showroom. Such a miracle had been known to occur on a very hot day.
Monsieur Ildefonse, Eglantine’s husband, was sitting in the little glass cage off the back showroom, pompously referred to as the Bureau. This individual had once been a very noted personality; no other, actually, than the French Queen’s appointed coiffeur; in consequence sought after to frenzy by every woman with the smallest pretension to Fashion. Fine ladies had had their heads dressed at six o’clock in the morning, nay, even three days before some special assembly at Court.
To be able to say, with a toss of flying vaporous curls, exquisitely redolent of Poudre à la Maréchale: “In effect, my dear one, Ildefonse’s last idea, what do you think of it? It is succeeded. Hein?” To be responded to, perchance, with a cry of envy and despair: “Ildefonse! You managed to get Ildefonse!” And to know your interlocutor, younger than you perhaps, and prettier, yet altogether at a disadvantage, “a positive frump, my dear,” under less skilful hands, that had been to reach, in verity, the very needle-peak of feminine triumph, a few years ago.
But star succeeds to star; one Monsieur Charles was Court twiddler, curler, crimper, frizzer, and general head artist. For Monsieur Ildefonse had come into a heritage and retired. Not a fallen star, therefore; merely astronomically removed to another hemisphere! He shone now, though, it may be added, with a doubtful radiance, in a restricted connubial circle; in other words, he sat at home and totted up accounts for his clever, money-making spouse; made bargains for her with flower manufacturers and mercers, and bullied the stewards of great houses when Madame la Duchesse or Madame la Connétable forgot to remember such insignificances as the settlement of bills.
Unanimously the workgirls adored him, with the single exception of Pamela; and the relations between Madame Eglantine and her consort, characterised in public by the most touching demonstrativeness, were regarded as the very romance of matrimony. But Pamela, who had come under the glance, more often than she cared, of Monsieur Ildefonse’s slyly roving eye, had her private opinion.
She shuddered from him as she had shuddered from the fat, sleek, brown slugs that came out after rain on the garden walls at home.
As a little girl she would explain: “’Tain’t that I’m afraid, you see, but it makes me creep.”
She could have found no better words in which to describe the effect upon her of the fascinating Monsieur Ildefonse.
There was a midday lull, this scorching day, even in Madame Eglantine’s thriving establishment. It was late season, too, and save for orders like that of the little Marquise D’Aimargues, for such as were privileged to join in the pastimes of Royal haymaking and churning, or a stray wedding order, business was slack, and the great little milliner herself was preparing for that round of the most noted watering places, with “just a few models” in her baggage, which was her thrifty fashion of spending the holidays.