“Gratified vanity goes a precious long way, so I suppose she is happy and satisfied,” he thinks with a sneer, and a sort of savage sensation in his heart, that he has not found her in a barely furnished room, devoid of luxury, and indicative of high moral worth.
It certainly is not marvellous that La Blonde aux Yeux Noir has created a regular furore in Paris.
As the heavy red velvet portières are pushed aside, and she comes into the room, the sneer dies right away from his mouth, and he confesses that this woman is a thing to wonder at.
If she had struck him as beautiful in her diaphanous robes, in her semi-nudity, with manacles of gold on her neck and arms, fit for an Eastern Satrap’s love, she strikes him as ten times more attractive in her day attire.
She wears a deep wine-coloured satin, covered with a profusion of lace; the bodice is cut square and the sleeves are open and hanging. Her throat and slender wrists gleam like the purest alabaster under the delicious rose-tinted light, and wine-coloured bands, studded with small but rare brilliants, go round them. Her hair, perfectly golden, falls in light bright curls above her dark straight brows, and is knotted carelessly, but artistically, in thick glossy coils at the back of her well-shaped head.
She is thoroughly well got up, she has made the most of herself in every particular, and yet she has the art of letting her magnificence seem part and parcel of herself, as if it belonged to her and was not a studied effect.
And one of Marguerite Ange’s attractions is that she looks so young; she cannot have reached one score to judge by her flawless face and her slender figure, which is all bends and curves without an angle in it.
“I scarcely dared to hope that you would come and see me,” she says in French that is true Parisian, though Delaval has heard that she comes from Arles, the birth-place of beauty; and she holds out, rather deprecatingly, a slim white hand, which, of course, he clasps eagerly, a sharp thrill going through him as he does so.
“Why not?” he asks in as excellent French as her own. “Could I be the only man to resist the Queen of—Hearts?”
And his voice has certainly a fervour and a ring of truth about it, which perhaps gratifies her, for a little smile, savouring of triumph, crosses her lips.