Monsieur Ildefonse was very glib of tongue.
“A-ah!” said Madame, smiling horribly. “You and Meess flatter me in your private conversations.”
“My charmer, how can I console myself in your absence, except by——” he broke off, for at that moment, with sounds of pomp, a thunder of hoofs, a crash and a clatter, the street woke up indeed, as Miss Pounce had prognosticated. And Madame D’Aimargues drove up in her four-horsed coach.
Madame Eglantine cast off her rage, as one may divest oneself of a garment, to be re-assumed at the chosen moment; Monsieur Ildefonse, with a relieved shrug of his huge shoulders, began to retire, cat-footed, to his den.
“Remain as you are, Meess,” commanded the milliner, now entirely concentrated on the exigencies of her business.
She shook out her flounces and summoning the bland business smile to her features cast a swift glance at the nearest mirror before taking two steps to greet her valuable patroness.
It was that glance at the mirror which precipitated the catastrophe. By some counter-reflection, Madame Eglantine’s jealous eyes caught a vision of Ildefonse, her husband, her cabbage, the little rat of her heart, pausing in his turn to cast a final ogle upon the abandoned, the sly, the seductive, the shameless Meess!
Eglantine beheld that ogle. She swallowed her emotion. She was above all femme d’affaires. Everything must give way before the profit of the moment. She could wait.
The little Marquise, blonde and slim and rouged, ethereal yet vivid, fluttered in, fanning herself, tried on her hat, chattered, laughed, approved, exclaimed upon the heat, and, still fanning herself, departed, leaving on Pamela’s mind the impression of a glittering butterfly, as lovely, as useless, and as impalpable. You could crush her, thought the girl, between finger and thumb.
Her serious lambent gaze had hardly followed the radiant apparition to the door, when the explosion burst forth.