"Don't be vulgar, Mazie."
Mazie's answer was to tango to Cornelia's cupboard, singing provocatively:
"I learnt more from Billy,
On the day I stayed from school,
Than teacher could have taught me in a week."
She would have said and done much more than this to annoy Cornelia. But she remembered in time that her sayings or doings might offend Claude Fontaine who, in the words of a fellow Outlaw, was "rich, but refined." She never knowingly gave offence to any form of wealth whilst there was hope of exploiting its owner even on the smallest scale. Besides, she was more than a little afraid of Cornelia.
After helping herself to an undiluted drink, she pranced back to the studio couch and flung herself upon it, face downwards, with the abandon of a Russian ballet dancer.
"Thank the Lord it's to be a masked affair," she called out to the others. "What'd be the good of a regular look-and-see ball? Nowadays men are that timid, you can't have a lark with them unless they don't see what they're doing, nor who they're doing it with."
"Are you throwing stones at me?" asked Claude.
"No, at Robert Lloyd. What's he doing in these diggings, anyhow? Why, he's a regular pale-face. If he's the new man—you know the kind—the kind that won't kiss a girl in the dark without first asking her permission—then give me the old Nick."
"Don't blame it all on poor Cato," Cornelia intervened.
Cornelia Covert was about thirty, blonde, loose-framed and of medium height. Her rich golden hair sounded a dominant note of which her pupils and her eyebrows were overtones. A firm, square chin heightened an illusion of strength with which her form invested her, but which her pale coloring and listless eye did not support.