"Never!" said Miss Cornell fervently; then relapsed into languor.
"I hope those papers are not important, Sophie, they are blowing all over the room."
"Yes, they're very important. They're all about a Malay abduction case which a friend of Brookie's is defending in the Courts next week. It's the greatest fun, Brookie and Capron were shrieking over it this afternoon."
"Is Mr. Capron a lawyer?"
"Oh, no—he isn't anything; just a pal of Brookie's. He's a Johannesburger, but he has a house here as well, and tons of money, and a lovely wife—a perfect stunner, my dear—Brookie says she is the loveliest woman in Africa; but Capron has always got his eye on some other woman. By the way, Rosalind, to-day he was describing a girl he had seen in a rickshaw, and from the description I feel sure it was you. Your particular style of beauty appears to have struck him all in a heap."
Miss Cornell made this statement as though she thought it humorous, which, indeed, she did, for that anyone should admire a girl so unlike her own type, and her own idea of beauty which that type represented, seemed to her really funny and incredible. Yet she looked intently now, and observed, so far as in her lay, "with the seeing eye," and for the first time since they had met—the girl before her. Nick Capron's unmistakable enthusiasm had made a great impression upon her.
"He said that you were alone in a rickshaw," she told Poppy, "and that he and Mrs. Portal were walking together and met you. And Mrs. Portal said you looked like a Burne-Jones dressed like a Beardsley poster. What rot these society women talk! Who can understand a thing like that?"
"What is Mrs. Portal like?" asked Poppy, remembering now the well-bred-looking woman who had been talking about Burne-Jones to the man with the dissipated eyes on the day of her arrival.
But Sophie took no heed of the question. She was closely and furtively regarding Poppy, and thinking: "Has she any attraction for men, I wonder? She's not a bit smart ... and so pale ... and yet, and yet ..." Here Sophie's expression of thought gave out. If she could have expressed it, she would have added: "She is pale, and yet glows as though something within her is alight."
"I hope you did not tell him anything about me?" asked Poppy suddenly.