“Thank you, my lady.”
The door opened; trailing silks swept over the carpet....
“I can’t kiss you through all this brown-gold silk,” said the Duchess’s voice. “Stop, though! You shall have it on the top of your head.” And the kiss descended, light as a puff of thistle-down. “I kiss Cull there sometimes, when I want him to be in a good temper. He says it thrills right down to the tips of his toes.... You’re smiling! I guess you think the stock of thrills ought to be exhausted by this time—three years since we stood up together on the deck of Cluny F. Farradaile’s anchored airship, a posse of detectives from Blueberry Street guarding the ends of the fore and aft cables, where they were anchored three hundred feet below in the grounds of the N’York Æther Club, just to prevent any one of the dozens of Society girls who’d tried their level best to catch Cull and failed, from coming along with a bowie and cutting ’em.... You remember the pars. in all the papers, headed, ‘A Marriage Made in Heaven,’ I guess?”
“Of course, of course,” said the Duchess’s hostess and dearest friend.
“My invention,” said her Grace, “and mighty smart, I reckon. I’d always said I’d be married in a real original way—and I was. The only drawback to the affair was that she pitched—I mean the airship—and the Minister, and Cull, and Poppa, and the inventor—that’s Cluny F. Farradaile—were taken poorly before the close of the cer’mony. As for my sex, I’m proud to say that Amurrican women can rise superior even to air-sickness when Paris frocks are in question. But when they wound us down we were glad enough to get back to dry land. We found a representative of the Customs waiting for us, by the way; and if Poppa hadn’t gone to law about it, and proved that we were really fixed on to the States by our cables, we’d have had to plank down the duty on every jewel we’d got on. Say, pet, I’m perishing for a smoke!”
The Duchess was supplied with cigarettes. Pauline placed upon a little table the materials that “factorize,” as the Duchess would have said, towards the composition of cognac and soda, and glided out.
“Now I call that a real pretty, meek-looking creature,” said her Grace, blowing a little flight of smoke rings in the direction of the door. “If she’s as clever as she’s nice, Siddie, you’ve got a treasure!”
“She is a good maid,” responded Lady Sidonia. “For one thing, she knows a great deal about the toilette, and on the subject of the complexion she’s really quite an authority. She knows something of massage, too—on the American system—for, though an English girl, she has lived in your country——”
“Oh!” said the Duchess, with an accent of interest. “Has she, indeed?”
“She’s reasonable, too,” went on the maid’s mistress; “and not a limpet in the way of sticking to one mode of doing the hair and refusing to learn any other. Then she can wave——”