"I have no appointment," she answered. "But—I came because of a message. I'm the Duchess of Claremanagh."
"Please to walk in, Madam," said the woman, without any evidence of being impressed. "I will give you a private room to wait in."
They stood in a hall, white-panelled, carpeted with red. The spruce black silk figure threw open a door, and Juliet entered a tiny room, hardly more than a closet. The only furnishing consisted of a luxurious easy chair, a table on which were magazines and a box of cigarettes, and on the wall a mirror. This mirror was opposite the chair; and behind the chair was a second door. Any one opening that door would see a reflected image of the sitter in the chair.
As Juliet sank into chintz-covered depths the murmur of voices reached her. She thought, in fact, that she heard sounds from two rooms, one on each side of the tiny cubicle in which she had been put to wait.
"This little hole is for special visitors," she told herself. "Probably that woman was ordered to bring me here if I came. Madame Veno's room must be on the right of this, and it's her voice I hear on that side, talking to a client. On the left, I suppose, it's the ordinary waiting room, full of people—jabbering to each other about Madame Veno and the wonderful things they've heard about her from their friends! Or else it's a room where they keep up the practice by manicuring clients' nails. But I'm sure she means to sneak me in ahead of them."
Juliet was right. In less than ten minutes there was the click of a latch, and the door opposite the mirror opened. In the long glass her eyes met the smiling ones of a pale, dark woman with a clever, somewhat common face. There was nothing mystic about her appearance, but on the other hand there was nothing meretricious, no attempt at Eastern allurements. Juliet had already guessed from the ordinary furnishing of the flat that Madame Veno's metier was clean, straightforward frankness, as opposed to the cult of dim rooms, purple curtains, and incense. Now this impression was confirmed. The one false note was a heavy perfume such as some women adore and are unable to resist.
"I'm glad to see you, Duchess," said the woman. "I hoped you would call, and I'm going to slip you in before the others who are waiting their turn. They won't know, so no harm's done! Will you come into my room?"
She spoke cheerfully, briskly, rather more like an Englishwoman than an American, and Juliet wondered if she were an English Jewess.
The door led into an alcove of a fair-sized room decorated in green. It was as little as possible like the mysterious sanctum of an ordinary "fortune teller" or crystal gazer. Juliet had seen two or three of these in several countries. They had always been Egyptian, or at least reminiscent of Leon Bakst. This might have been any woman's boudoir: but when Madame Veno had drawn the thin green curtains, the place seemed to fill with an emerald dusk, like the dusk of dreams, or the green dimness under sea.
"I suppose you think I'm not very 'psychic'," the mistress of the room remarked, placing a chair for her visitor at a table covered with a square of green velvet. "People do think that! Then, when they've consulted me, they're surprised sometimes. They get better results than from those who go in for what I call 'scenery'. You know what I mean?"