But not so Margarita's. It was furnished and decorated in grey-blue tints, because I had suggested this. It had odd touches of greyish rose, because Whistler had insisted on it. It was fitted with old mahogany, because Roger liked this and collected it here and there. But of all the personality that her father-lover had known how to build into his home of exile, there was absolutely none.
Was it because there were no work-baskets, spilling lace and bits of ribbon, no photographs, no keepsakes, hideous perhaps, but dear for what they represent, no worn girlhood's books, no shamefaced toys, lingering from the nursery, no litter of any other member of her family? Perhaps. Mme. Modjeska, then, and even now one of the greatest actresses on our stage, called it an unwomanly room, but I am not quite sure that this is precisely what she meant.
No, the most vivid impression the room could make upon me was one that brings a reminiscent chuckle even to-day. As my eye fell on the antique dressing-table, I seemed to see, suddenly and laughably, Margarita, sweeping down the stairs, enveloped in a billowy peignoir, her hair loose, her eyes flashing furiously, in her extended finger and thumb, held as one would hold a noxious adder, a thin navy-blue necktie.
"Is that yours?" she demanded tragically of her husband.
"Why, yes, I believe it is," said Roger, with the grave politeness that years of intimacy could never take from him.
"I found it on my dressing-table!" she thundered, and her voice echoed like an angry vault, "on—my—dressing-table!"
She dropped it like a toad at his feet, swept us all with the lightning of her eyes, coldly, distastefully, and swam up the stairs, an avenging goddess, deaf to Roger's matter-of-fact apology, blind to Miss Jencks's deprecating blushes. As for me, so under the spell of that voice have I always been, that I swear I thought her hardly used—the darling vixen!
