"Was it so—" Lady Wathe shrugged her thin shoulders and gave the ghost of one of her rattling laughs. "If to fight your way back, stage by stage, amidst inconceivable difficulties, obstacles and insults, is horrid!—if to travel for two long days and nights in trains crowded to suffocating excess merits the term—" She loosened the quadruple string of superb Oriental pearls that tightly clipped her stalk-like throat and went on: "If it comes under the heading to find yourself and your friends—in tatters after a suffocating struggle!—packed with sixty other squalid wretches in a luggage-van en route for Dieppe! If to sit for three hours on your jewel-case, waiting, in a crush of congested humanity, for the arrival of the Newhaven boat—if to fight as with beasts at Ephesus to gain its gangway—if to fall in a heap on the sodden deck—to lie there lost to everything but the fact that the waves that drench you are British waves, and the British coast is slowly crawling nearer!—if all this and how much more, can be lumped under the term of horrid, it has been, dear Lady Wastwood, horrid in the extreme!"
Lady Wastwood's small, triangular, white face with the V-shaped scarlet mouth, looked enigmatical. She arched the thick black slurs that were her eyebrows again, and said not without intent, to her crony Cynthia Charterhouse:
"Who would have dreamed only three weeks ago, when that excessively long-legged and extremely good-looking Count von Herrnung sat here and talked to us about German women and German Supermen—that we should be at War to-day with Germany?"
"Poor Count Tido!" Something rattled in the Goblin's meagre throat as though she had accidentally swallowed some of her pearls. "That dreadful report in The Wire made the Franzenbad treatment disagree with me horribly! To be drowned in that commonplace North Sea crossing, upon the very eve of realising the one ambition of his life! For he hated us so thoroughly! His Anglophobia was a perfect obsession. Poor dear Tido! One might call it a wasted career!" The speaker dried a tear and continued: "His family will be frantic. You know he was to have been married in October! Baroness Kriemhilde von Wolfensbragen-Hirschenbuttel. Immensely rich! Her father has large interests in the pearl-fisheries of German New Guinea. Her betrothal gift, a superb black and white pearl, the Count always wore as a mascot. Poor Baroness! She will be inconsolable. Marriage means the first draught of real freedom to young German girls!"
Mrs. Charterhouse said in her sweetly venomous way:
"Miss Saxham bears up—under the circumstances!"
"Under what circumstances, might one presume to ask?" Then, reading aright the ambiguous smile of Mrs. Charterhouse, the Goblin rattled out her characteristic laugh:
"What absurdity! You refer to a mere dinner-table flirtation in Paris. The mere rapprochement of atomes crochus! Miss Saxham and Lady Beauvayse dined with us on the night of the Grand Prix. Poor Tido was certainly struck with her. I remember he talked about her eyes and figure afterwards. But her hair being so black and growing so heavily—did not please him. He found the effect—I think his term was—'too crepuscular.'"
"Ah! You throw a ray," said Mrs. Charterhouse in that sugared way of hers, "on a mystery that has intrigued me. Now I know why Miss Saxham went to the Atelier Wiber in the Rue de la Paix and got her crepuscular tresses changed to terra-cotta!"
"Not saffron? Now," said Lady Wastwood, pensively tilting her own green-gold head and elevating her arched black eyebrows, "I should have called that shade saffron or tumeric. Who do you suppose footed the bill for the process? The wretch Wiber simply won't look at you under four hundred and fifty francs!"