“What on earth is happening to that woman, Camain?” she demanded. “Her arms are sprouting at the ends. And who is the man?”
“That, ma belle,” responded her admirer, “is the nymph Daphne, turning into a laurel to escape the attentions of the god Apollo—a pretty prudery not likely, I fancy, to find many imitators in these days, eh, ladies?”
Violent protests from the ladies of the party.
“Oh, oh, Citizen Deputy, you have left some fleur-de-lys on the wall!” observed one of them. “Is that to be on the safe side—in case a Bourbon should return?”
“Fleur-de-lys? Nonsense!” returned M. Camain, putting up his spy-glass to look at the poor scorched remnant of tapestry hanging there. “Those things you see round that bit of border are . . . humming-birds, heraldic humming-birds!”
Much laughter greeted this sally. “And what is this queer long beast over the hearth?” demanded another voice.
“With a crown on its head, too! Oh fie!”
“It is not, at any rate,” said one of the two youngish men of the party, in the extraordinary lisp cultivated by the would-be fashionable, “the strange fowl to whose nest some one has set fire just as she was going to lay, which we saw in the Salle Verte!”
So it went on, the flow of humour; and after visiting most of the apartments on the first floor, where M. Camain tripped badly as an expositor of the story of Psyche, and where Valentine’s own apartments, though arousing much interest, were voted horribly old-fashioned in decoration, they came to the second, to the door of the locked gallery with the china and portraits. Mme de Trélan had hoped that she might have been spared that—for how should she look upon that portrait in primrose satin to-day?—and sick at heart as never before, she had contrived to trail behind. She heard Camain’s voice explaining what was in the room while he waited for her to unlock the door. Then she realised that the key, being a special one, was not on the concierge’s bunch, and that she had in consequence forgotten to bring it with her. She came forward and said so. “But I will go and fetch it instantly, Monsieur le Député.”
“Do, pray,—though I regret to put you to the trouble,” said her employer. “Meanwhile, ladies, come out on to this balcony, and you will see——”