"It will jump Fuschia Fleming's way," replied Dita confidently. "You haven't met her."
"Is she so beautiful then? As beautiful as you?"
"Oh, no," Perdita was smoothing out her gloves on her knee. She shook her head decidedly. "Nothing like. She isn't beautiful at all. She's just a slender creature with rather colorless blonde cendre hair and blue eyes."
"Oh," Maud was plainly puzzled. "Then what do you mean?"
But Perdita only smiled. "Have you and Wallace made up yet?" she asked with what appeared to the other woman striking irrelevance. "Impertinent, I know; but there's a reason?"
"No-o-o," said Maud reluctantly and evidently wondering if Dita had suddenly lost her mind.
"Then do so at once," advised her business associate. "Do so before he meets Fuschia Fleming."
"From what you say." Miss Carmine's chin was high and haughty. "I see no cause for alarm."
"No?" Perdita tapped the table with her finger-tips, still inscrutably smiling.
Maud rarely permitted herself to become angry, but she did so now. She had never imagined that Perdita could be so aggravating. "Just because Cresswell lost his head about her, you think—" she flashed out.