"You've got an army here, already. What do you want me for? If you keep on calling me away from the manikins whenever Harry is explaining matters, he'll never be able to train me into taking charge of them."
"My dear!" trilled Cornelia, bringing her most musical arpeggio into play. "When you've been married as long as I have, you'll understand that no sensible woman ever interferes with her husband's work except for a positively overwhelming reason."
"Really, the reasons here in Paris are as bad as the seasons," said Janet with a smile. "I wish they'd calm down and not overwhelm us quite so often."
"Ah, Janet, you well may jest. Little do you know of the heavy responsibilities involved in managing both a business and a husband. If I had only myself to think of the worries and risks would be as a whisper in the wind. But I think of Hercules sharing my anxieties, working himself thin and gray—"
While she went on in this theatrical vein, Janet was thinking to herself: "She makes as great a virtue of being married as she formerly made of not being married. Whatever her condition, there's a terrible to-do about it."
Aloud she said:
"Look here, Cornelia, if you want to talk privately to me, hadn't we better get rid of this retinue?"
Without awaiting a reply, she calmly released Marie and the other manikins from service and sent them out of the room. This done, she took a chair opposite the desk where Cornelia sat staring at her in speechless indignation.
Cornelia cherished a sort of mental chromo of herself as the active ruler of the Paulette community, a ruler at once imperious, genial, and adored. In point of fact, her insatiable appetite for attention, reinforced by a sharp tongue, spread an atmosphere of dread and anxiety around her. Janet was the only person who had ever succeeded in weakening Cornelia's illusion about herself by bringing it into occasional juxtaposition with reality.
"You'll greatly oblige me, Janet, by not ordering my servants about under my very nose."