"Who is it?" said a sweet, slight voice.
"Sophy. I've come too early."
"Oh, you darling!" called the voice. "Come in. It isn't locked." Sophy heard her add, "Open the door for Mrs. Chesney, Marie."
She opened the door herself before the maid could reach it, and entered. The room was charming grey and pink. The dressing-table was as elaborate as a lady-altar. Before it sat Olive, with her beautiful powdery brown hair over her shoulders. Only one soft puff was in place at the back of her head. The air was full of the scent of "Chypre," a perfume then very fashionable and which Sophy disliked. She could not understand why Olive used it. "Violet" or "Clover" would have suited her so much better.
She went up to Olive, and they kissed each other.
"You darling!" said Mrs. Arundel again. "How stunning you look! And what luck! Did you think it was for eight?"
"I thought your note said eight o'clock."
"Then it was my beastly handwriting. But I'm awfully glad, all the same. Now we can have a comfy talk."
Sophy sat in a little Louis XVI chair and watched the hair-dressing. She thought, as she so often did, how much prettier it would look dressed simply, without being frizzled so elaborately in front and puffed so intricately behind. Mrs. Arundel's face had taken on the serious look that women's faces wear when their hair is being dressed. Her eyes were large and candid, of a soft Madonna-blue. Her small, prettily shaped mouth was pastel pink. All her features were small and prettily shaped. She was the type of woman who still looks girlish at thirty-five. As Sophy watched her she was also thinking of how even her friends said that "Olive was never happy unless she had a lover." Three years in England had taught Sophy that a woman may be an excellent mother, a good friend, an attentive wife, and yet have "lovers." How strange it seemed to her! She could not imagine such a thing happening without an upheaval of the universe—her universe, at least. She could understand a woman, made desperate by unhappiness, "running away" from her husband with another man—but to go on living with one man as his wife and having a lover—lovers—— She had given up trying to solve it. She knew that Olive's present flame was a Roman nobleman—Count Varesca—an attaché of the Italian Embassy. She seemed to bloom under it into a sort of recrudescence of virginal charm.
"How you stare with your great eyes, you dear!" said Olive. "Don't I look nice?"