So to Madame Seraphine, of Clanricarde Place, Lady Lesbia was taken as a lamb to the slaughter-house.
Seraphine had made Lady Kirkbank's clothes, off and on for the last thirty years. Seraphine and Georgia had grown old together. Lady Kirkbank was always dropping Seraphine and taking her up again, quarrelling and making friends with her. They wrote each other little notes, in which Lady Kirkbank called the dressmaker her cher ange—her bonne chatte, her chère vielle sotte—and all manner of affectionate names—and in which Seraphine occasionally threatened the lady with the dire engines of the law, if money were not forthcoming before Saturday evening.
Lady Kirkbank within those thirty years had paid Seraphine many thousands; but she had never once got herself out of the dear creature's debt. All her payments were payments on account. A hundred pounds; or fifty—or an occasional cheque for two hundred and fifty, when Sir George had been lucky at Newmarket and Doncaster. But the rolling nucleus of debt went rolling on, growing bigger every year until the payments on account needed to be larger or more numerous than of old to keep Seraphine in good humour.
Seraphine was a woman of genius and versatility and had more than one art at her fingers' ends—those skinny and claw-shaped fingers, the nails whereof were not always clean. She took charge of her customer's figures, and made their corsets, and lectured them if they allowed nature to get the upper hand.
'If Madame's waist gets one quarter of an inch thicker it must be that I renounce to make her gowns,' she would tell a ponderous matron, with cool insolence, and the matron would stand abashed before the little sallow, hooked-nosed, keen eyed Jewess, like a child before a severe mother.
'Oh, Seraphine, do you really think that I am stouter?' the customer would ask feebly, panting in her tightened corset.
'Is it that I think so? Why that jumps to the eyes. Madame had always that little air of Rubens, even in the flower of her youth—but now—it is a Rubens of the Faubourg du Temple.'
And horrified at the idea of her vulgarised charms the meek matron would consent to encase herself in one of Seraphine's severest corsets, called in bitterest mockery à la santé—at five guineas—in order that the dressmaker might measure her for a forty-guinea gown.
'A plain satin gown, my dear, with an eighteenpenny frilling round the neck and sleeves, and not so much trimming as would go round my little finger. It is positive robbery,' the matron told her friends afterwards, not the less proud of her skin-tight high shouldered sleeves and the peerless flow of her train.
Seraphine was an artist in complexions, and it was she who provided her middle-aged and elderly customers with the lilies and roses of youth. Lady Kirkbank's town complexion was superintended by Seraphine, sometimes even manipulated by those harpy-like claws. The eyebrows of which Lesbia complained were only eyebrows de province—eyebrows de voyage. In London Georgie was much more particular; and Seraphine was often in Arlington Street with her little morocco bag of washes and creams, and brushes and sponges, to prepare Lady Kirkbank for some great party, and to instruct Lady Kirkbank's maid. At such times Georgie was all affection for the little dressmaker.