Slim and brown, nimble and compact, Louise brought her guests in turn to Madame Mornay-Mareuil. Miriam was annoyed that Louise should have failed to recognize in her trying aunt a grande dame of unchallenged authority. With instinctive deference, the company had grouped itself about her, and Miriam smiled with a trace of vindictive satisfaction, for she had been as quick as Louise to resent the unconscious patronage in Girlie Windrom’s way of beginning a remark with, “Of course, out here——”
She went to Dare, who was standing aloof, near a window. “Have you kissed the queen’s hand?” she inquired.
“Not yet . . . The little doctor seems to have put one over on the Eveleys!” Dare’s lips went down with a cynical humor which Miriam noted as new. There was also something new in his eyes. “I for one,” he said, “am glad.”
“Why?”
“Simply in the name of poetic justice. It’s time Mrs. Eveley got a bit of her own back,—and Boadicea there will get it for her with a vengeance.”
Miriam gave him a smiling nod and went to obey Louise’s summons.
Dismayed by the astonished hush which had fallen over the hall when Aunt Denise had appeared on the staircase and come slowly towards her, Louise had quickly appreciated the dramatic value of the intrusion, and when she had manoeuvred every one safely to the table she acknowledged that the preliminary touch of solemnity had given her dinner party a tone which, instead of diminishing, would incalculably augment the triumph she had, for months now, determined that it should be. She had known Aunt Denise only as a formidable quantity in her background, an aunt she had seen during a single summer, after her mother’s death, but with whom she had corresponded in a sentimental desire to maintain contact with the only relative she could claim, except for some half mythical cousins in Dublin. That her letters to Aunt Denise and her gifts of needlework had been seeds sown on fertile ground was now abundantly manifest; for Aunt Denise had assumed a protective kinship and had made that mysterious kind of “impression” of which she herself, for all her success, would never learn the secret.
Of the whole company only Girlie, with her defective focusing apparatus, had failed to pay immediate homage. In a pretty white dress, she had perfunctorily acknowledged Aunt Denise’s graciousness and begun to turn away, when the old lady transfixed her with relentless black eyes. “I suppose it is the fashion to walk with a bend nowadays,” Aunt Denise had said. “It doesn’t give the lungs a chance.”
Girlie had blushed and straightened, but Aunt Denise had withdrawn her eyes and turned them more charitably on little Mrs. Brown.
A stock soup had been simmering on the back of the stove for two weeks. By the time she had tasted it, and found it perfect, Louise’s spirits were at their highest voltage, and her eyes flashed down the table till they encountered Miriam’s, which gave back a signal of felicitation. Miriam, between Dare and Jack Wallace, was beating time to an argument sustained by Lord Eveley and Pearl Beatty against Mr. Windrom and Amy Sweet, the latter lending her aid in the form of giggles, for which three sips of wine,—the first in her life, and drunk in open contempt of the pledge Mrs. Boots had once persuaded her to sign,—were responsible.