"For pity's sake, more candles, Zélie!" she repeated. "You look absolutely diabolic in this uncertain light."
"In an instant, madame. I am compelled first to fix this curl in place."
She accomplished the operation with most admired deliberation, and moved away more than once, to observe the effect, before finally adjusting the hairpin.
"I cannot but regret that madame is unable to wear her hair turned back from the face. Such an arrangement confers height and an air of spirituality, which, in madame's case, would be not only becoming but advantageous."
Helen skidded the hand-glass down upon the dressing-table, causing confusion amid silver-topped pots and bottles, endangering a jar of hyacinths, upsetting a tray of hairpins.
"Have I not repeatedly given you orders never to allude to that subject," she cried.
The maid was on her knees calmly collecting the scattered contents of the tray.
"A thousand pardons, madame," she said, with a certain sour impudence. "Still, it must ever be a matter of regret to any one truly appreciating madame's style of beauty, that she should be always constrained to wear her hair shading her forehead."
Modern civilisation imposes restrictions even upon the most high-spirited. At that moment Madame de Vallorbes was ripe for the commission of atrocities. Had she been—as she coveted to be—a lady of the Roman decadence it would have gone hard with her waiting-woman, who might have found herself ordered for instant execution or summarily deprived of the organs of speech. But, latter-day sentiment happily forbidding such active expressions of ill-feeling on the part of the employer towards the employed, Helen was forced to swallow her wrath, reminding herself, meanwhile, that a confidential servant is either most invaluable of friends or most dangerous of enemies. There is no viâ media in the relation. And Zélie as an enemy was not to be thought of. She could not—displeasing reflection—afford to quarrel with Zélie. The woman knew too much. Therefore Madame de Vallorbes took refuge in lofty abstraction, while the tiresome uncertainties, the conflicting inclinations of the past day, quick to seize their opportunity, as is the habit of such discourteous gentry,—returned upon her with redoubled importunity and force.
She had not seen Richard since parting with him at noon, the enigmatic suggestions of his conversation still unresolved, the alternate resentment at his apparent indifference and attraction of his strong and somewhat mysterious personality still vitally present to her. Later she had driven out to Pozzuoli. But neither stone-throwing urchins, foul and disease-stricken beggars, the pale sulphur plains and subterranean rumblings of the Solfaterra, nor stirring of nether fires therein resident by a lanky, wild-eyed lad—clothed in leathern jerkin and hairy, goatskin leggings—with the help of a birch broom and a few local newspapers, served effectually to rouse her from inward debate and questioning. The comfortable, cee-spring carriage might swing and sway over the rough, deep-rutted roads behind the handsome, black, long-tailed horses, the melodramatic-looking coachman might lash stone-throwing urchins and anathematise them, their ancestors and descendants, alike, to the third and fourth generation in the vilest, Neapolitan argot, Charles might resort to physical force in the removal of wailing, alms-demanding, vermin-eaten wrecks of humanity, but still Helen asked herself only—should she go? Should she stay? Was the game worth the candle? Was the risk, not only of social scandal, but of possible ennui, worth the projected act of revenge? And worth something more than that. For revenge, it must be owned, already took a second place in her calculations. Worth, namely, the enjoyment of possible conquest, the humiliation of possible defeat and rejection, by that strangely coercive, strangely inscrutable, being, her cousin, Dickie Calmady?