“A business,” he said, “which I take it, madam, is in a flourishing condition.”
“You may say so, sir.” Her pride increased. “Since Miss Pamela Pounce—that’s me!—has been made head of the department, Madame Mirabel can scarce execute the vast number of orders.”
“Upon my word!” He had removed his spectacles, and was smiling on her in his turn in a kindly, detached, faintly satiric way. “I trust Madame What’s-Her-Name recognises her debt to you?”
The head milliner gave her curls ever so slight a toss.
“Well, sir, she wouldn’t like to lose me. She knows I’m worth my weight in gold to her.”
His glance flickered over her comely proportions. Tall, generously made, he had called her a nymph. “Goddess would have been the better appellation,” murmured he.
“Well, ’tis a comfort to an old man like myself to meet one so youthful to whom work is proving both fruitful and blessed.”
Miss Pamela Pounce didn’t need any old gentleman to commend her. She knew the value of work, and who better? And if it was blessed to her, why she took good care that it should be. And, as to content with her lot—sure, if she hadn’t been, she wasn’t a fool, she’d have picked out another for herself.
“’Tis some old clergyman,” she thought, and laughed. “He’ll scarce know what a hat means. Clergyman’s wives and daughters in the country would give any woman of taste bad dreams for a fortnight. There was Mrs. Prue Stafford. Had she not still to learn that to wear pink and blue with such cheeks as she had was positive vulgar? And she married to the finest of fine gentlemen.”
Sir Everard folded his spectacles, put them carefully into his breast pocket, and closed his Virgil. Here was an opportunity of studying a—to him—hitherto quite unknown branch of humanity, after an unexpectedly pleasant fashion. The girl pleased him. He had called her brass and humoured the simile. A shining, solid composition of metal that took a handsome polish and showed itself boldly for what it was. He liked her for her spring of youth, her frank pride of her trade, for having no petty nonsense nor poor pretentiousness to pass for what she was not. He liked her brave independence. There was, he thought, a better modesty in her quiet certainty than any prudish airs and graces could have lent her.