"Oh! Don't I look—gorgeous!" she stammered
Wriggling out of the cloak and veil that wrapped her like a chrysalis she emerged suddenly a glimmering, shimmering little oriental figure of satin and silver and haunting sandalwood—a veritable little incandescent rainbow of spangled moonlight and flaming scarlet and dark purple shadows. Great, heavy, jet-black curls caught back from her small piquant face by a blazing rhinestone fillet,—cheeks just a tiny bit over-tinted with rouge and excitement,—big, red-brown eyes packed full of high lights like a startled fawn's,—bold in the utter security of her masquerade, yet scared almost to death by the persistent underlying heart-thump of her unescapable self-consciousness,—altogether as tantalizing, altogether as unreal, as a vision out of the Arabian Nights, she stood there staring quizzically at Stanton.
"Would you call it—an—equivalent? Would you?" she asked nervously.
Then pirouetting over to the largest mirror in sight she began to smooth and twist her silken sash into place. Somewhere at wrist or ankle twittered the jingle of innumerable bangles.
"Oh! Don't I look—gorgeous!" she stammered. "O—h—h!"
VIII
Everything that was discreet and engaged-to-be-married in Stanton's conservative make-up exploded suddenly into one utterly irresponsible speech.