"Girl, ain't you dressed yet? What you doin'? Waitin' for your French maid to get your French lawngerie from the French laundry?"
Miss Du Prez swung herself atop the trunk and crossed her slim limbs. Chatelaine jewelry jangled; Herculean perfume dominated the air, and that expressive sobriquet for soubrette, a fourteen-inch willow-plume, and long as the tail of a male pheasant, brushed her left shoulder.
Miss Ysobel Du Prez—one of the ornamental line of tottering caryatids who uphold on their narrow, whitewashed shoulders the gold-paper thrones of musical-comedy principalities, and on those same shoulders carry every tradition of that section of Broadway which Thespis occupies on a ninety-nine-year, privilege-of-renewal lease—the fumes of grease-paint the incense of her temple, the footlights the white flame of her sacrifice!
"You gotta do a quick change if you're going to the offices with me to-day, girl. I gotta be up at the Empire in the Putney Building by eleven and stop in at the Bijou first."
Delia shed her comfortable shroud of repose like Thais dropping her mantle in an Alexandrian theater.
"I must 'a' overslept, Ysobel. Trying on them duds we bought yesterday up to so late last night done me up. Three days in New York ain't got me used to the pace."
"You should worry! If I had your face and figure I'd sleep till the call-boy rapped twice."
"Ah, Ysobel, you with your cute little face and cute little ways!"
"Soft pedal on the ingenoo stuff, girl. You know you don't hate yourself. I didn't notice that you exactly despised anything about you when they called the floor-walker to have a look at you in that black dress yesterday."
"Honest, Ysobel, I dreamt about it all night."