Then Poppylinda, the majestic black cat, trod up the steps of the porch and rubbed herself against her mistress's foot, as if saying, “Anyhow, I'm here!”
Missy reached down and lifted Poppy to her lap. She adored Poppy; but she couldn't help reflecting that a Skye terrier (though she had never seen one) was a more distinguished kind of pet than a black cat. A black cat was—well, bourgeois (the last rhyming with “boys”). Airy fairy Lilian's pet was a Skye. It was named Fifine, and was very frisky. Lilian, as she sat exchanging sprightly badinage with her many admirers, was wont to sit with her hand perdu beneath the silky Fifine in her lap.
“No, no, Fifine! Down, sir!” murmured Missy absently.
Poppy, otherwise immobile, blinked upward an inquiring gaze.
“Naughty Fifine! You MUST not kiss my fingers, sir!”
Poppy blinked again. Who might this invisible Fifine be? Her mistress was conversing in a very strange manner; and the strangest part of it was that she was looking straight into Poppy's own eyes.
Poppy didn't know it, but her name was no longer Poppylinda. It was Fifine.
That night Missy went to bed in her own little room in Cherryvale; but, strange as it may seem to you, she spent the hours till waking far across the sea, in a manor-house in baronial England.
After that, for a considerable period, only the body, the husk of her, resided in Cherryvale; the spirit, the pulsing part of her, was in the land of her dreams. Events came and passed and left her unmarked. Even the Evans elopement brought no thrill; the affair of a youth who clerks in a bank and a girl who works in a post office is tame business to one who has been participating in the panoplied romances of the high-born.
Missy lived, those days, to dream in solitude or to go to Tess's where she might read of further enchantments. Then, too, at Tess's, she had a confidante, a kindred spirit, and could speak out of what was filling her soul. There is nothing more satisfying than to be able to speak out of what is filling your soul. The two of them got to using a special parlance when alone. It was freely punctuated with phrases so wonderfully camouflaged that no Frenchman would have guessed that they were French.