“I can’t live at home with Aunt Stella hating me like this,” weakly.
And here she was right. Even Ferdie recognized that his sister and his daughter were henceforth not likely to dwell together in a state of affectionate harmony. Stella had been queer about Deb ever since discovery that Deb was—initiated. What was to be done? And then La llorraine appeared at Montagu House, an emissary from Deb.
“My dee-urr—leave it to me.”
La llorraine was magnificent, she was Miladi, she was Josephine Beauhamais, and Madame de Maintenon and Louise de Querouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, and every other intriguante of foreign history, entrusted with dispatches and a cardinal’s secret, a go-between from one royal court to another. She wore filmy black, and a huge black hat cast a mysterious shadow over her eyes; she wore all her sables, and Parma violets; and fingered them meaningly with her long thin white hands as though they were a symbol of a lost cause. She flattered, cajoled and hinted, and laid down her cards and picked them up again; and her speech was worldly and witty and wise, and her smile was maternal, or suggestive, or discreet, and she overwhelmed Ferdie Marcus with dupery and diplomacy, and left him quite dazed, but convinced that the arrangement made was the only one possible in view of the subtleties involved; and that moreover it had emanated straight from him.
“So, my dee-urr, you join us in our humble little appartement, and your father will put you in possession of your own income. Have I done well?”
“—Turned out of home plus a cheque-book?—that’s what I call an éviction de luxe,” laughed Antonia, when Deb told her of the new arrangement, while re-packing her suit-case to quit Zoe’s flat five days after her weary arrival. Zoe was out at rehearsal.
“What are you going to pay La llorraine per week for board and lodging?”
“My-dee-urr,” Deb imitated the grand manner and the large gesture by which her future landlady had dismissed the question—“Zat—between us? it shall arrange itself——”
Antonia looked enigmatic, and warned Deb that the first time she arrived at the appartement, and found her breakfasting at eleven o’clock in a dirty wrapper and curl-papers, in the Venetian drawing-room, on stale mayonnaise, with La llorraine practising scales, and Manon being demure with the fishmonger because the canaille wanted to be paid, she would immediately haul her off to an environment less pictorial but more hygienic.