“Why not make an allusion to Puss-in-Boots—something of that kind? All those old stories come more or less out of the Arabian Nights, don’t they, and this is supposed to take place in the East?”
“If you’re going to have Puss-in-Boots, you may as well have Dick Whittington,” said Dolly Kendal brightly, and quite as though she was making a relevant and reasonable observation.
“I don’t somehow quite see Puss-in-Boots, or even Dick Whittington, in the piece,” said Nancy Fazackerly—but she said it with so much hesitation, in her fear of hurting anybody’s feelings, that one quite felt they might very well have been there all the time, without our having been clever enough to recognize them.
“Why not little Bo-Peep, while we’re about it?” Sallie asked sardonically. “Do let’s get on, instead of wasting time like this.”
I saw Mrs. Fazackerly gaze at her with fearful admiration. Perhaps Claire saw it too—and she does not ever think that admiration, of any kind, is good for Sallie.
“I don’t want to interrupt,” she began smoothly, and I got ready to be interrupted at once. “But you do the whole thing so well, Sallie darling, that it’s a shame it shouldn’t be absolutely perfect.”
Claire has not yet discovered that, to Sallie’s generation, tact is as objectionable as plain speaking is to her own.
“I want you to see how a real Eastern maiden, which is what you’re supposed to be, would move. You walk like a European. Now look at me.”
Of course, that was all she wanted. We looked at her.
Claire has a beautiful figure, and she moves very well. But I do not know that she has any particular claim to expert knowledge about Eastern women. However, there she was, in her own house, and of course everybody looked at her while she gravely walked up and down—everybody, that is to say, except Sallie, who was ostentatiously lighting a cigarette.