“Old Duchess Hattie,” said the girl lightly. “Everybody in England knows her. Among other things she’s my godmother.”
“Oh!” said Mame. Warily and at once she withdrew her gaze from the ancient duchess to this new friend who claimed her for a godmother. Involuntarily her fingers clutched her vanity bag to make sure it was still on her wrist. London as well as New York had its four-flushers. Mame looked at the girl opposite with a new curiosity.
Was she the real thing? Or was she merely putting one over on an obvious simp? Certainly she was smart. And if not exactly a looker, she had heaps of style. Besides she had these high-grade waiters feeding from the hand. The Wop had already interrupted these deep reflections with Bohea in a china pot and crumpets fairly sizzling in butter.
Followed more conversation in Italian. The girl then fitted an eyeglass, very neat and inconspicuous, into her right eye and glanced at the programme of music. “Don’t you think we might have the Rosencavalier instead of this thing of Massenet’s for number seven?” She looked at Mame. But Mame, out of her depth, merely looked at the waiter. “Yes, I think so.” The girl provided the answer for herself. “Give my compliments to M’sieu.” She turned quietly to the Wop as if she owned him and continued her speech in Italian.
Virgilio bowed gracefully and made his way up the room towards the band.
Mame, under cover of a bold attack on a crumpet, furtively watched her new friend. She was puzzled and fascinated by her. This bird was something new. Her clothes were of the best yet they were not startling. Even her eyeglass and her meerschaum cigarette holder, remarkable in anyone else, did not seem out of the picture. Her talk was lively and clever; her attitude towards that world which ordinary people only read about in the newspapers was one of an amused familiarity; yet her manners were neither boastful nor loud. If four-flusher she was, and Mame felt she must be, it was a more subtle breed than any which had crossed her path up to now.
For the pleasure of drawing the girl out and perhaps in the hope that she would give herself away in a handful large enough to set all doubts at rest, Mame tentatively said over the edge of a teacup, while marking the new acquaintance very closely indeed: “I s’pose you know all the folks.”
“More or less.”
Somehow it was not the answer Mame expected. A real four-flusher would have posed a bit in making it. She would have struck something of an attitude, and tried to look like an oil painting of a First Family. But this girl didn’t. Paula Wyse Ling, who had spent two whole years studying European society and was now beginning to get her stuff into some of the best journals in America, would never have answered such a question in that casual style. Paula would have preened her feathers and with her voice right up would have looked down her long nose and said: “Oh, yes, I have had the privilege of meeting some quite good people.”
Suddenly Mame’s eye lit on one other appurtenance of this new friend which hitherto had escaped it. Peeping in the oddest way out of a fashionable sleeve was the tiniest imaginable Pekingese. The sight of the quaint creature was so unexpected and its air of dignified aloofness so entirely charming that Mame could not repress her delight.