“Come and see your room,” went on Sophy. “You’re here at any rate for a day or two, and I’ll keep you as secretly and preciously as a saint in a shrine. You’ve no luggage? Of course, I forgot!—I’ll lend you a nightie!—and you must buy a lot of clothes to-morrow and a box to pack them in. It won’t do for you to go abroad without any luggage. And I’ll help you choose your garments, Di!—you must have something really becoming!—something not after the taste of ‘Pa’ or ‘Ma!’”
“Am I to make a conquest of Dr. Féodor Dimitrius?” asked Diana, playfully. “One would think you had that sort of thing in view!”
“One never knows!” said Sophy, shaking a warning finger at her. “Dr. Dimitrius may be hideous—or he may be fascinating. And whether hideous or fascinating, he may be—amorous! Most men are, at moments!—and in such moments they’ll make love to anything feminine.”
“Not anything feminine of my age,” said Diana, calmly. “He distinctly advertises for a woman of ‘mature’ years.”
“That may be his cunning!” and Sophy looked mysterious. “If we are to believe history, Cleopatra was fifty when she enchanted Anthony.”
“Dear old Egyptian days!” sighed Diana, with a whimsical uplifting of her eyebrows. “Would I had lived in them! With a long plaited black wig and darkened lashes, I too, might have found an Anthony!”
“Well, dress does make a difference,” said Sophy seriously. “That is, of course, if you know where to get it made, and how to put it on, and don’t bundle it round you in a gathered balloon like ‘Ma!’ What a sight that woman does look, to be sure!”
“Poor mother! I tried to make her clothes sit on her,” murmured Diana, regretfully. “But they wouldn’t!”
“Of course they wouldn’t! They simply couldn’t! Now take Mrs. Ross-Percival,—a real old, old harridan!—the terror of her grown-up daughters, who are always watching her lest her wig of young curls should come off,—she gets herself up in such a style that I once heard your father—an easily duped old thing!—say he thought her ‘the most beautiful woman in London!’ And it was all the dress, with a big hat, cosmetics and a complexion veil!”
Diana laughed.