“No!” said Gerry rather vacuously.
“No!” said Lottie’s mother, pulling off some very handsome rings and hanging them upon the horns of a coral lobster that adorned the dressing-table. “She takes about twenty minutes to make up.” Her pretty, white, carefully-manicured fingers busied themselves, as she talked, with various little pots and bottles and rolls of a mysterious substance of a pinky hue, not unlike the peppermint suck-stick of Gerry’s youth. “And are you as much in love with her to-day,” she continued, “as you were last night?”
“So much in love,” said Gerry, uncorking himself, “that to call her my wife I would sacrifice everything.”
“To call her your wife?” The little lady pushed her hair back from her face, twisted it tightly up behind, and pinned it flat with a relentless hairpin.
“To make her my wife,” Gerry amended, with a healthy blush.
“Ah!” said the little lady, who had covered her entire countenance, ears, and neck with a shiny mask of pinkish paste. “A word makes such a difference.” She dipped a hare’s-foot into a saucer of rouge, and with this compound impartially, as it seemed to Gerry, incarnadined her cheeks and chin. “Of course,” she went on, dipping a disemboweled powder-puff into a pot of French chalk and deftly applying it, “you are aware that she possesses in years the advantage of yourself.”
“I am twenty-three,” said Gerry proudly.
“She owns to more than that!” said the lovely Lottie’s mother. She had reddened her mouth, hitherto obliterated by the paste, into an alluring Cupid’s bow, and darkened in, above her wonderfully brilliant eyes, a pair of arch-provoking eyebrows. Now, as some inkling of the fateful revelation in store clamped Gerry’s jaws upon his stick and twined his legs in a death-grip about the supports of his chair, she rapidly, with a blue pencil, imparted to those brilliant eyes the Oriental languor, the divinely alluring, almond-lidded droop that distinguished Lottie’s, seized a tooth-brush, dipped it into a bottle, apparently of liquid soot, rapidly blackened her eyelashes, indicated with rose-pink a dimple on her chin, groped for a moment in a cardboard box that stood upon the ledge of her toilet table, produced a golden wig of streaming tresses, dexterously assumed it, pulled here, patted there, twisted a brow-tendril into shape—and turning, shed upon the paralyzed Gerry the smile that had enchained his heart.
“I told you Lottie would not be long,” said Lottie, “and I’ve made up under twenty minutes. You dear, silly, honorable, romantic boy, don’t stare in that awful way. Twenty-three indeed! And I told you I owned to more! I ought to, for I have a son at Harrow, and a daughter of seventeen besides.... Do try and shut your mouth. Why, you poor dear goose, I was making my bow to the boys in the gallery when you were playing with a Noah’s Ark. Shake hands, and go round in front and see me do my piece, as usual. I’ve got used to that nice fresh face of yours up in Box B, and applause is the breath of my nostrils, if I am old enough to be your mother. Leave your flowers; my girl at home has got quite to look out for them—and be off with you, because this”—she indicated the French chalk—“has got to go farther!” She gave Gerry her pretty hand and one of the brilliant smiles, as he blundered up from his chair, gasping apologies.
“Come and lunch with us to-morrow. You know my address, and I’ve told the Professor all about you. You’ll like the Professor—my husband. One of the best, though his wife says it. And the children——”