“Oh Blanche, Blanche, Blanchie love!” she exclaimed, “I could dance to the click of your brother’s spurs.”
“You’d not be the first to, dear darling!” Mademoiselle de Lambèse replied, adjusting her short shock of hair before a glass.
Mademoiselle de Lambèse believed herself to be a very valuable piece of goods, and seemed to think she had only to smile to stir up an Ocean of passion.
“Poor Ann-Jules,” she said: “I fear he’s in the clutches of that awful woman.”
“Kalpurnia?”
“Every night he’s at the Opera.”
“I hear she wears the costume of a shoe-black in the new ballet,” Mademoiselle de Nazianzi said, “and is too strangely extraordinary!”
“Have you decided, Rara,[1] yet, what you’ll wear for the ball?”
“A black gown and three blue flowers on my tummy.”
“After a Shrimp-tea with the Archduchess, I feel I want no dinner,” Mademoiselle Olga Blumenghast, a girl with slightly hunched shoulders said, returning from the window.