She was a little woman, of piquancy and resource, and a very accomplished angler of men. She could count on her pink finger-tips the ten most killing baits for vanity. And, having once recovered the button, she set herself to conciliating it with a thousand pretty kisses and attentions. It lived between the bosom of her frock and the ruff of her dainty nightgown. Yet for a long time it sulked, refusing to be coaxed into better than a tacit staying of its devastating hand. And so matters stood when the Assembly ball was held.
Miss Emma Belmont and Mrs. John Belmont lived in the same town, connexions, but apart. Their visits were visits of ceremony—and dislike. Miss Emma was Mr. John’s sister, and had always highly disapproved of his marriage with the “adventuress.” Her very name, she thought, bordered on an impropriety! How could any “Inez” dissociate herself from the tradition of cigarette-stained lips and white eyeballs travelling behind a fan like little moons of coquetry? This one, in fact, took no trouble to. Her reputation involved them in a common scandal; and it was solely on this account, I think, that she so resented her sister-in-law’s appropriation of the button. She herself was devoted to good works, and utterly content in her mission. She did not want the button; but, inasmuch as it was a Belmont heirloom, and Mrs. John childless, she chose to symbolize in it the bone of contention, and to use it as a convenient bar to amenities which would, otherwise, have seemed to argue in her a sympathy with a mode of life with which she could not too emphatically wish to disconnect herself.
They met at the Assembly ball. Miss Belmont, though herself involved in the financial ebb, had considered it her duty to respect so respectable an occasion, and even to adorn it with a silk of such inflexibility that (I tremble as I write it) one could imagine her slipping out of it through a trap, like the vanishing lady, and leaving all standing. Presently Mrs. John Belmont, with a wicked look, floated up to her.
“You here, Inez!” exclaimed Miss Emma, affecting an amazement which, unhappily, she could not feel.
The other flirted and simpered. When she smiled, one could detect little threads drawn in the fine powder near the corners of her mouth. There was no ensign of widowhood about her. She ruffled with little gaudy downs and feathers, like a new-fledged bird of paradise.
“Yes, indeed,” she said. “And I’ve brought Captain Naylor, who’s been dining with me. Shall I introduce him to you?”
Miss Belmont’s sense of decorum left her speechless.
Inez, on the contrary, rippled out the most china-tinkling laugh.
“You dear old thing,” she tittered. “Don’t look so shocked. I knew you’d be here to chaperon me, and——” She came a step closer. “Yes, the button’s there, Emma. You may stare; but make up your mind, I’m not going to part with it.”
Miss Belmont found herself, and responded quietly—