Miss Mazerod looked round critically.
“Some of them,” she said, “are frame-makers, a good many of them, with big bills in high places. Others are actresses—very great actresses off the stage. Do you see that tall girl there, with a supercilious expression which she does not know is apt to remind one of a housemaid scorning a milkman's love on the area steps? She is a great actress, who will not take small engagements, and is not offered large ones. She is an actress 'pour se faire photographier.'”
“And this is the cream of London society?” said Dora, looking round her with considerable amusement.
“Society,” returned her cousin, “is not allowed to stand for cream now. It is stirred up with a spoon, silver-gilt, and the skim milk gets hopelessly mixed up with the cream. That young man who is now talking to the actress person is not what he looks. He is, as a matter of fact, the scion of a noble house, who models in clay atrociously.”
“And the gorgeous person he is turning his back upon?”
“One of his models.”
“Of clay?”
“Essentially so.”
And Miss Mazerod broke off into a happy laugh. Hers was not the bitterness of plainness or insignificance, but something infinitely more suggestive. It was, indeed, not bitterness at all, but light-hearted contempt, which is, perhaps, the deepest contempt there is.
“Who is the wretched woman with no backbone draped in rusty black?” asked Dora.