Eight or ten aspirins, I should think, would not be enough to restore her, could she but have a glimpse of the society into which Lady Anastasia's great-granddaughter is now plunged.
And in such an "infra dig." position, too!
For I am not "an artist," as they all are! I am distinctly quite below them! I am in domestic service. A "dresser" of the girl whom all of them call "Nellie" when they are not using the generic "dears" and "darlings" to her. And yesterday I heard the Serio-singer with the autumn-foliage hair telling the stout lady (whose place in life seems to be swinging on a trapeze in emerald-green tights and with a parrakeet perched on each wrist) "That that little Smith was quite a nice, refined sort of little thing, very different from the usual run of girls of that class. They're so common, as a rule. But this one—well! She's the sort of girl you didn't mind sitting down with, or saying anything in front of.
"Her and Nellie Million seemed to be more like two sisters than mistress and maid, what I can see of it," said the washed-out-looking Serio, who "makes up," Million says, with dark brows and well-defined scarlet lips until she must be quite effective, "on."
"There's something very queer about those two girls, and the way they are together," added the Serio. (One really can't help overhearing these theatrical voices, and all the windows were wide open.) "There's that gentleman cousin of Nellie's, who always calls the other girl 'Miss' Smith. D'you notice, Emmie? He treats her for all the world as if she were a duchess in disguise! It might be her he was after, instead of the other one?"
"With Americans," said the green-tights-and-parrakeets lady impressively, "it's a fair puzzle to know what they are 'after'!"
She, I know, has toured a good deal in the States. So she ought to know what she is talking about. But Mr. Hiram P. Jessop is the only American of whom I can say that I have seen very much.
Each day he has driven over from Lewes, that drowsy old town with one pricked-up ear of a castle on a hill; and he spends hours and hours talking to the little cousin whom I really think he sincerely likes.
"And, mind you! I am not saying that I don't like him," Miss Million confided to me last night as I was brushing her hair. "Maybe I might have managed to get myself quite fond of him, if—if," she sighed—"I hadn't happened to meet somebody else first. I don't see any manner of use in getting engaged to one young man when it is another that you fancy. Simply asking for trouble, that is. Haven't I read tales and tales about that sort of thing?"
I sighed as I tied a bit of pink ribbon round the ends of Miss Million's dark plaits. If only she hadn't happened ever to meet that incorrigible Jim Burke!