“That’s at my pleasure, and one more piece of sauciness and you’ll be the one to go. But I’ll charge them for the cruet—ninepence a week, and any breakages will be double—double. And now, please, what are the names of the precious pair?”
“Didn’t ask.”
“No, you wouldn’t—decidedly not. You’d turn my house into a warren for all the rag-bag and nameless vagabonds in the town. I’ll see them myself, and you can be sure I’ll have my say, too.”
“Then I should take off my ’at and straighten up a bit first—for you look for all the world like a needle in a hay-stack.”
Emma walked from the room and slammed the door.
Mrs. Montmorency rose from her chair and, approaching the mirror on the mantelshelf, Narcissus-fashion surveyed her own loveliness therein. Seemingly she found Emma’s counsel good, for she removed her hat and cast it upon a chair, where it was crushed in the emotional crisis that followed. Her hair she pawed and patted into some pretensions to order—her face she enriched with a fresh crust of powder. From a scent-spray, convenient to hand, she directed a jet of some heliotrope-coloured fluid upon her bosom. This done, she straightened her figure and passed out into the passage, with primmed lips.
To avoid the impression that by letting a room she sacrificed the privilege of entering it at will, she turned the handle of Eliphalet’s door, without knocking, and walked inside.
It happened that the old actor had closed his eyes for a few moments and was sleeping—his back toward her. Mrs. Montmorency sniffed, but, failing to awaken him, circumnavigated the table until his features, lit up by the cast-down glare of the incandescent gas, confronted her own.
For a moment she looked and then, with a curious throttled cry, turned about and fled.
Eliphalet sprang to his feet and arrived in the passage in time to see the door at the far end swing to with a bang that shook the house.