“You surprise me, Monsieur Pigeonneau.”
“Will you tell me, Madam, to what I am indebted for this honour?”
“To be sure. I haven’t yet told you that I have come to beg you to help me to design an Egyptian costume for the fancy ball at Countess N———‘s. I want a costume that shall be absolutely accurate and bewilderingly beautiful. I have been hard at work at it already, M. Pigeonneau. I have gone over my recollections, for I remember very well when I lived in Thebes six thousand years ago. I have had designs sent me from London, Boulak and New York.”
“Those would, of course, be more reliable.” “No, nothing is so reliable as one’s intuition. I have also studied in the Egyptian Museum of the Louvre. It is full of enchanting things. Figures so slender and pure, profiles so delicate and clear cut, women who look like flowers, but, at the same time, with something at once rigid and supple. And a god, Bes, who looks like Sarcey! My goodness, how beautiful it all is!”
“Pardon me, but I do not yet quite understand——”
“I haven’t finished. I went to your lecture on the toilet of a woman of the Middle Empire, and I took notes. It was rather dry, your lecture, but I grubbed away at it. By aid of all these notes I have designed a costume. But it is not quite right yet. So I have come to beg you to correct it. Do come to me to-morrow! Will you? Do me that honour for the love of Egypt! You will, won’t you? Till to-morrow, I must hurry off. Mama is in the carriage waiting for me.”
She disappeared as she said these last words, and I followed. When I reached the vestibule she was already at the foot of the stairs and from here I heard her clear voice call up:
“Till to-morrow. Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne, at the corner of the Villa Saïd.”
“I shall not go to see this mad creature,” I said to myself.
The next afternoon at four o’clock I rang the door-bell. A footman led me into an immense, well-lighted hall crowded with pictures and statues in marble and bronze; sedan chairs in Vernis Martin set with porcelain plaques; Peruvian mummies; a dozen dummy figures of men and horses in full armour, over which, by reason of their great height, towered a Polish cavalier with white wings on his shoulders and a French knight equipped for the tournament, his helmet bearing a crest of a woman’s head with pointed coif and flowing veil.