“Stay, I guess, with the Vanderbilts and the Astors when you visit New York?” Mame threw a plummet to bring her down to cases.
“The MacFarlanes are my particular friends.” She spoke off-handedly. “And they always give one such a good time.”
“I’ll say, yes,” Mame remarked drily. She was not quite clear in her mind whether the madam could be allowed to get away with that. She would be saying next that in London her headquarters were Buckingham Palace.
The girl produced a cigarette case. It was a wonderful piece of chinoiserie in flowered purple silk. “Have a gasper?”
Mame had yet to acquire the habit of smoking gaspers. She declined with thanks. But the girl fitted an amber-scented one to the meerschaum holder so elegantly, that Mame decided to practise the art at the first opportunity. Paula Ling had said that it was even more chic in Europe than it was on Long Island. As usual Paula Ling was right.
While Mame, out of the corners of a pair of very seeing eyes, marked all that the smart piece did, she took a resolve to start in at once to develop her own personality. Here was terrific personality. It did not in any sense obtrude; it did not sort of hit you right in the middle of the eye, as Paula’s did, but it was there all the time. Moreover, it was earning dividends for its owner. This skirt was not in the true sense of the word a looker, but there was jazz in her talk, in her actions, in all her ways. She did not paint her face, use lip-stick or bead her eyes; in clothes, although Mame guessed they were as good as could be got for money, she was quiet; but her general effect was as salt as a breeze from the sea. Mame could but envy and admire and wonder how the trick was done.
“Staying long in England?”
“I’ll have to get off this side of the world pretty soon now.” Mame spoke a little wistfully.
Without seeming to look at Mame, the girl, from behind the rampart of the meerschaum holder, must somehow have read the true index to her feelings. That index was Mame’s eyes. Very good eyes they were; and, unknown to their owner, singularly expressive. Grey eyes, large, serious, open, full of trouble. For all the orbs behind the meerschaum holder were so impersonal, when as now they were three-quarters lidded, they had a power of seeing into things that might have astonished Mame considerably had she known the full extent of their faculty.
“Anything I can do for you?”