Mrs. Crespin nodded. “The door was opened by a hideous, hump-backed old woman, just like the wicked fairy in a pantomime. She didn’t actually bite me, but she looked as if she’d like to—and we passed on. More corridors, with curtained doorways, where I had a feeling that furtive eyes were watching me—though I can’t positively say I saw them. But I’m sure I heard whisperings and titterings—”
“Good Lord!” Crespin broke in. “If I’d thought they were going to treat you like that, I’d have—”
“Oh,” his wife retorted, “there was nothing you could have done; and, you see, no harm came of it. At last the woman led me into a large sort of wardrobe room, lighted from above, and almost entirely lined with glazed presses full of frocks. Then she slid back a panel, and there was a marble-lined bathroom!—a deep pool, with a trickle of water flowing into it from a dolphin’s head of gold—just enough to make the surface ripple and dance. And all around were the latest Bond Street luxuries—shampooing bowls and brushes, bottles of essences, towels on hot rails and all the rest of it. The only thing that was disagreeable was a sickly odor from some burning pastilles—oh, and a coal-black bath-woman.”
“It suggests a Royal Academy picture,” Traherne observed. “‘The Odalisque’s Pool.’”
“Or a soap advertisement,” Crespin objected.
“Same thing,” Traherne said lazily.
“Well, I wasn’t sorry to play the odalisque for once,” Lucilla assured them, “and when I had finished, lo and behold! the ayah had laid out for me half-a-dozen gorgeous and distinctly risky dinner-gowns.” Traherne gnawed suddenly at his lip, Crespin frowned angrily, but neither spoke or moved, and Lucilla, not catching their common thought, went on, “I had to explain to her in gestures that I couldn’t live up to any of them, and would rather put on my old traveling dress. She seemed quite frightened at the idea—”
“She’d probably have got the sack—perhaps literally—if she’d let you do that,” Crespin said slowly, and a hard, fierce look came into the other man’s eyes.
But Lucilla still seemed unconscious of their thought, and continued quite cheerfully—Rukh a little in her blood now, Traherne thought—“Anyway, she at last produced this comparatively inoffensive frock. She did my hair—fancy her being able to do it like this!—and wanted to finish me off with all sorts of necklaces and bangles, but I stuck to my old locket with the babies’ heads.”
“Well,” her husband said discontentedly, “all’s well that ends well, I suppose. But if I’d foreseen all this ‘Secrets of the Zenana’ business, I’m dashed if I wouldn’t—”