These same assistants--four pretty, fresh and charming girls--were peculiar, to say the least of it. They bore Eastern names, to match their garb and the shop; but only the eldest of them--fancifully called Badoura--was in full possession of the five senses appertaining to humanity. Zobeide was adder-deaf, Peri Banou could not speak, and Parizade's beautiful blue eyes were sightless. Why Madame Coralie should have chosen these defective beings to attend on her customers was a mystery to all. But there was method in the old woman's apparent madness; for each of the trio, lacking a single sense, had more or less developed the remaining ones to unusual perfection. The blind Parizade possessed a marvellously deft touch, and her olfactory nerves were so keen as to cause her positive pain. Dumb Peri Banou had eyes like those of a lynx, and could spy out wrinkles and flaws and spots and grey hairs in a way which no other woman could have done; while Zobeide's deafness was more than compensated by her instinct for colouring complexions, and her faultless judgment in blending and preparing the various herbs, drugs and spices which combined to form those wares Madame Coralie's customers so eagerly purchased.
Badoura overlooked the three girls when Madame was absent, and being in full possession of her senses was extremely clever, diplomatic and managing. She attended mainly to the shop, while Parizade massaged wrinkled faces and kneaded figures into shape. Of the other two girls--Zobeide tinted wan cheeks, burnished drab hair, and pencilled delicate eyebrows, leaving Peri Banou to diagnose fresh cases, to point out defects, make suggestions, and put the final touches to renovated beauty. These four girls, under the able superintendence of Madame, could give a bulky matron the shape of Hebe, and could change the yellow of an unpleasant complexion to the rosy hues of dawn. The weary, worn women who passed through their hands said good-bye to them--with many thanks--as sprightly, blooming girls, with at least ten or twenty years taken from their ages. No wonder Madame Coralie was adored as Medea, and was looked upon by Society dames as their best and dearest friend, with the emphasis on the second adjective.
Madame Coralie boasted that no woman, not even the plainest, need despair while the wonder-shop--as some called it--was in existence; but it must be confessed that she found it sometimes difficult to work the expected miracle. Nature had done her worst with some customers, and no artificial aids could improve them, while others had left the renovative process too late, and there remained only unpromising material out of which to reconstruct the youthful past. Lady Branwin, for instance--really, it was impossible to do anything with Lady Branwin. When she came one June evening at five o'clock to the Turkish Shop, its owner told her so in the rude, bullying manner of a despot, who knows that her victim cannot object. Madame Coralie only assumed her cajoling voice and manner when her customers were insolent in a well-bred way--to the meek, she spoke like the skipper of a tramp with a Dago crew.
"I can't do anything for you," said Madame Coralie, bluntly; "you never had a good figure, or even the makings of one. All the massage and stays and dieting in the world can never improve it into anything decent."
"My complexion isn't so very bad," faltered Lady Branwin, not daring to rebel against this priestess of the toilette mysteries.
"Your what? Leather, my dear; thick, yellow leather, through which the blood can never show. No wash will make any impression on it, so why waste my time and your money?"
Lady Branwin, inwardly furious but outwardly submissive, dropped panting on to the soft divan of the particular alcove wherein this agreeable conversation was taking place. She somewhat resembled the autocrat of Mayfair, being stout and black-eyed, and short in stature. Her face had once been pretty and piquant, but being small and delicate was now sketched, as it were, on superabundant adipose. Her hair was really white with age, but from the use of many dyes had become parti-coloured, and her complexion was sinfully muddy. The sole beauty she possessed were two magnificent Spanish eyes, as large as of Madame Coralie, but scarcely so hard in expression. She was richly arrayed in a dove-coloured silk dress and a loose mantle of brown velvet trimmed with moonlight beads, together with a "Merry Widow" hat, appallingly un-becoming to her tiny features. Also she glittered with many brooches, bracelets, chains, and jewelled buttons, and even dangled a pair of lengthy earrings, after the barbaric fashion of the Albert period. Indeed, Lady Branwin did not look unlike a barbarian, say, an Esquimau, or an Indian squaw, with her yellow face, her squat figure, and her multiplicity of jewellery, although in this last respect she more resembled an Oriental. She breathed hard, and the tears came into her eyes as Madame Coralie continued her very personal remarks. "A sack," said the restorer of youth, "mere sack--a ruin of what you were sixty years ago."
This was too much, and the worm turned. "I am only fifty--you know I am."
"You look like a hundred, and nothing I can do for you will make you look less," was the relentless answer. "You eat and drink and sleep too much, and never take exercise, and your eyes show that you take morphia."
"I don't--it's not true. How dare you say so--how cruel to--"