THE EDDY
CHAPTER I
"If only she were a boy!"
Mrs. Treharne almost moaned the words.
She tugged nervously at her absurdly diaphanous boudoir jacket, vainly attempting to fasten it with fluttering, uncontrolled fingers; and she shuddered, though her dressing-room was over-warm.
Heloise, who was doing her hair, juggled and then dropped a flaming red coronet braid upon the rug. The maid, a thin-lipped young woman with a jutting jaw and an implacable eye, pantomimed her annoyance. Before picking up the braid she glued the backs of her hands to her smoothly-lathed hips. Mrs. Treharne, in the glass, could see Heloise's drab-filmed grey-blue eyes darting sparks.
"I shall resume," croaked the maid in raucous French, "when Madame is through writhing and wriggling and squirming."
Laura Stedham—she was relaxing luxuriously in the depths of a chair that fitted her almost as perfectly as her gown—smiled a bit wickedly.
"Forgive me if I seem catty, Tony," said Laura in her assuaging contralto, "but it is such a delight to find that there is some one else who is bullied by her maid. Mine positively tyrannizes over me."