"Imaginez-vous!" she told Mrs. Kesteven. "I never knew until this year that I had Greek feet. Le vrai grec, with the arch and perfect toes--see?" She stuck out her short white foot. "An artist revealed it to me this year. Figure it to yourself! I have had them all these years and did not know."
She flung her little laugh to heaven, and the other women could not but join in it at this frank exhibition of vanity. Never was a little lady more thoroughly pleased with herself than Christiane de Vervanne, and, indeed, she was of those who add to the gaiety of nations. Without her cold, brilliant wit and Harriott Kesteven's gentle humour the party might easily have been heavy. Val, shrouding a brooding heart as well as a cropped head behind her blue veil, came forth little except when alone with Harriott or the children, whilst Kitty and Haidee, alternately weighed down by the new-born consciousness of their wonderful beauty and absolute desirability, were not amusing except unintentionally, and often indeed when their plans went wrong were sulky and quarrelsome. At other times they would be buoyed up to a pitch of perky inanity most provoking. But on the whole the two girls improved noticeably under the influence of their first flirtation. Haidee's cowboy habits dropped from her one by one never to return, and untidiness was no longer a habit. Kitty became gentler, too, and less inclined to treat her mother as a slave sent unto the world for her special benefit. Respect for their elders is one of the most attractive traits in the character of young French people, and the girls were quick to note the astonishment and disapproval of the Lorrains at any discourtesy shown by them to Val and Harriott. An actual demonstration of how parents should be treated could not be given by Sacha and Celine unfortunately, for (for reasons of his own at which Mrs. Kesteven and Val could make a good guess), General Lorrain, their only surviving parent, never called with his family at Villa Duval, nor even materialised when the English party took tea at Shai-poo. Val and Harriott often wondered whether he had taken the Comtesse into his confidence over the little contretemps on the digue when Mrs. Kesteven's ankle had been mistaken for that of Madame de Vervanne's. Certainly the latter gave no sign.
It transpired that she was in the position so unfortunate in France of having been obliged to divorce her husband. She was most frank about the details of her conjugal unhappiness, and the fact that she had been thrust a little way out of her own world since the divorce, did not seem to weigh her down very much. The Lorrains were among the few of her liberal and broad-minded friends to whom her position had made no difference. Her husband had been an officer in General Lorrain's regiment, and she married him when she was eighteen and he thirty and très connaisseur.
"Like most young girls I thought it was a very wonderful thing for him that I was conferring my innocence upon him--that he too shared my state of ecstatic bliss, and that it would last for ever. Quelle bêtise! Naturally for him it was nothing--he was soon ennuyée with my bliss. That is a mistake young girls make--they soon bore a sophisticated man with their simplicity."
"A sophisticated Frenchman, I dare say," said Harriott dryly.
"Ah! There you hit the affair on the back, Mistress Kesteven," agreed the Comtesse affably. "I do not spik of your Englishmen with the big hearts and the big feets."
She proceeded to describe the lady who stole her husband.
"She was my best friend, and I was very proud to know her--very chic, very Parisienne, and with the cleverness of forty. Ah! she was as subtle as an Egyptian! What chance had I against her when she began to put her cobra spells on de Vervanne? I could only look on like a fascinated rabbit." She burst into a peal of laughter. Val looked at her thoughtfully, wondering if she were the result of her ill luck or the cause of it. Certainly she had arrived at being much more like the cobra than the rabbit.
"Did you ever hear of the little baker's girl, who had to carry round the tarts and cakes to her master's customers? Some one said to her, 'Do you never take any of the nice tarts, my child?' 'Oh, no,' said she, 'that would be stealing. I only lick them, and that does no one any harm.'"
Harriott threw an apprehensive glance ahead. They were taking one of their long country walks, the younger folk marching in front, with Bran and a tea-basket to leaven their exuberance. It was a relief to see that they were out of ear-shot, for the Comtesse's baker-girl stories were apt to be very spiced bread indeed, and less likely to point a moral than to adorn some one without morals.