“You? Why you took the very means to reveal your self, wearing a dress so perfectly adapted to your nature. Anybody might have known you,” pouted Trix.
“Yes, anybody might have known me; but I do not think that anybody would have done so, if it had not been for a certain ‘expert’ who, detecting the ‘correspondences,’ as he calls them, divulged the secret to the whole room,” explained Sybil.
“Well, somebody found you out, and did it by the fitness of your costume too. But as for me, nothing could be more opposite in character than Janet Foster the Puritan maiden, and Beatrix Pendleton the wild huntress. We are about as much alike as sage tea and sparkling hock. Why, see here, Sybil; in order to throw every one off the track of me, I took a character as unlike mine as it was possible to find, and yet I have not succeeded in concealing my identity. And this has provoked me to such an extent that I have left the dance.”
“And so I find you sulking here. Well, Trix, I will tell you how they found you out. You and I are known to be the two smallest women in the whole neighborhood. After having found me out, through the divination of a magician, it was easy to see that the other small woman must be you.”
“Oh, I see; but it is perfectly exasperating!”
“So it is; but you may get some fun out of it yet, Trix, by turning the tables upon them all.”
“How? Tell me! I’ll do anything to get the better of them.”
“I cannot tell you now, for here comes my escort with my lemonade, and this matter must remain a secret between you and me. But listen: in fifteen minutes from this time slip away and go to my bedroom. You know the way, and you will find it empty. I will join you there, and tell you my plan,” said Sybil, in a very low tone.
At that moment her escort arrived with the glass of lemonade.