"Quel malheur!" replied the artist, indifferently, and Evangeline added, "I'd just as lieve."
With pursed lips Suzanne snipped and pinched, while Biscuits followed her every motion and Evangeline silently adjusted herself to each new position as Suzanne pulled and pushed her arms and neck about. At length with a sudden motion Suzanne stripped off the detached sleeves as if they had been gloves, and snatched away the top of the scant middle-aged waist with a quick movement. "Voilà!" she said, and Biscuits gasped: for Evangeline Potts was a transformed creature. Her arms and neck were ivory white and as soft and smooth as satin; the lovely curves of her throat and shoulders could never have been guessed at under the stiff black seams of the waist.
Suzanne patted her arms appreciatively. "I might have known it, with that hair and those freckles!" she murmured. Then, calmly, to Evangeline: "The trouble with your kind is, you never have any eyebrows and your eyelids get red, n'est-ce pas?"
She went a few steps back from the motionless figure and stood silent.
"You could twist a black scarf," suggested Biscuits, hastily. Suzanne waved her hand.
"Tu me dégoûtes, à la fin!" she said coldly; "Get your cape on!" Then, to Evangeline: "Undo your hair!" As the thick coil tumbled over her shoulders, the directress of ceremonies deliberately selected a light inner tress and snipped it off.
"Take it down town and match it—in velvet if you can, in silk if you can't," she commanded. "And get enough, get two, three yards!"
"But will Miss Potts want to spend—" Biscuits looked doubtfully at the white-armed goddess who contemplated herself quietly in the glass. It was impossible to know what she was thinking; she was apparently quite accustomed to strangers who dressed her in low-cut evening dresses and snipped her hair and spent her money.
Suzanne stamped her foot. "Va-t-en!" she cried, and then, with an irresistible mimicry of Evangeline, "She'd just as lieve!"
When Biscuits returned with a great strip of tawny velvet, it was taken from her at the door, and she was instructed to get from Suzanne's room her make-up box and the gold powder that had so unaccountably disappeared after the play last week.