"I say, Claude, have you heard?"
"What?"
"Jonson Ramer's here for the rehearsal!"
"I know. Can you tell me where Charmian is?"
"Haven't an idea! There's the prelude beginning! My! Where are my formamints?"
Charmian meanwhile had gone into the theater with a dressmaker, who had come to see the effect of Enid Mardon's costumes which she had "created." Charmian and the dressmaker, a massive and handsome woman, were sitting together in the stalls, discussing Enid Mardon's caprices.
"She tore the dress to pieces," said the dressmaker. "She made rags of it, and then pinned it together all wrong, and said to me—to me!—that now it began to look like an Ouled Naïl girl's costume. I told her if she liked to face Noo York—"
"H'sh-sh!" whispered Charmian. "There's the prelude beginning at last. She's not going to—?"
"No. Of course she had to come back to my original idea!"
And the dressmaker pressed a large handkerchief against her handsome nose, savored the last new perfume, and leaned back in her stall magisterially with a faint smile.