Beside her on the couch a couple of younger girls, also rather "stagily" dressed, were hanging on every word that fell from the music-hall favourite's vermilioned lips.
With her back to me, and with her chair drawn a little aside from the others, there sat yet another woman. She was enormously tall and slim, and eccentrically clad in Oriental draperies of some sombre, richly patterned stuff. This gave her the air of some graceful snake.
She turned and twisted the whole of her long, lissom person, now putting up a hand to smooth her slim throat, now stretching out a slender ankle; but all the time posing, and admiring the poses in the nearest mirror. She was scarcely listening to Miss Vi Vassity's chatter.
"Tea? Any more, anybody?" Miss Vassity's black eyes glanced about her. "Baby? Sybil? Lady G.?" (the latter to the cobra-woman).
"You, my dear?" turning to some one who was hidden behind her. "Half a cup—oh, come on now. It'll have to be a whole cup; we don't break our china here, as my dear old mother used to say at Baa-lamb.
"You know I sprang from the suburbs, girls, don't you? Better to spring than to sink, eh, Miss Millions—and trillions? Here you are; I'll pour it out."
The music-hall idol leant forward to the tea-tray. Beyond her sumptuous shoulder I caught a glimpse at last of the woman who'd been hidden.
I gasped with surprise. She was my Miss Million!
Yes! So these were the friends whom Mr. Burke had sent to call on her! And there she sat—or shrank—she who was supposed to be the hostess of the party!
Beneath her expensive new hat—quite the wrong one to wear with that particular frock, which she changed when I went out—her face was wide-eyed and dazed. She who had shown so much self-confidence at her last tea-party with just those two young men had lost it all in the midst of these other people.