“I’m in the kitchen,” cried a voice whose echoes carried hauntingly silver. “Come on down!”
A first glimpse of Félicie Durant was unforgettable. Large brown velvet eyes trimmed with elaborate fringes of lashes that curled up at the end, giving her face a look of starry oblivion to mundane matters; a face whose daintily regular features were brought out by a skin as smooth as the surface of a pearl, with a cobwebby maze of ringlets dark as her eyes, drifting around and away from her temples. All this Joy saw in one delighted instant. Then the lips, scarlet and full almost to pouting, parted in a smile of welcome, and Félicie waved a soapy hand at the two girls.
“Don’t come too near me—I’m washing the dog!”
Sure enough. There was the kitchen tub—and a little shivering white thing being drowned in suds. It was hard to connect Félicie with washing a dog, however little and white he might be.
“Good for you, old girl,” said Jerry. “Those poodles look like dirty dish-rags if they’re not put into Lux twice a day. Félicie, this is Joy Nelson, and you can see she did you the justice of dressing for a nice formal call.”
“Wait till I rinse him out and then I’ll shake hands,” Félicie panted. Sharing her breathlessness, the two watched while she first rinsed, then wrung out the animated mop, and put it down on the floor with an order to “go to it.” The mop whisked itself out of sight.
“He runs all around and rolls in all the rugs and gets dry all by himself,” she explained proudly.
“Is that hard on the rugs, or isn’t it? I just asked,” said Jerry.
The fringes flustered; the dark eyes drooped. “Why, I—I never—thought of that!” Félicie admitted. “But”—she brightened—“this is a furnished apartment, mostly, and the rugs are the old landlord’s. So it’s quite all right after all!”
“Does ‘the old landlord’ know you keep a dog?”