“Oh but you must!”
“I’m told it’s even finer than the one at the Railway Station. Ah, from musing too long on that Hellenic frieze, how often I’ve missed my train!” the Duchess of Cavaljos murmured, with a little fat deep laugh.
“I have a heavenly idea for another—Yellow tiles with Thistles....”
“Your Royal Highness never repeats herself!”
“Nothing will satisfy me this time,” the Archduchess declared, “but files of state-documents in all the dear little boxes: In secret, secrets!” she added archly fixing her eyes on the assembly.
“It’s positively pitiable,” the Duchess of Cavaljos commented, “how the Countess of Tolga is losing her good-looks: She has the air to-night of a tired business-woman!”
“She looks at other women as though she would inhale them,” the Archduchess answered, throwing back her furs with a gesture of superb grace, in order to allow her robe to be admired by a lady who was scribbling busily away behind a door, with little nervous lifts of the head. For noblesse oblige the correspondent of the Jaw-Waw, the illustrious Eva Schnerb, was not to be denied.
“Among the many balls of a brilliant season,” the diarist, with her accustomed fluency, wrote: “none surpassed that which I witnessed at the English Embassy last night. I sat in a corner of the Winter Garden and literally gorged myself upon the display of dazzling uniforms and jewels. The Ambassadress Lady Something was looking really regal in dawn-white draperies, holding a bouquet of the new mauve malmaisons (which are all the vogue just now), but no one, I thought, looked better than the Archduchess, etc.... Helping the hostess, I noticed Mrs Harold Chilleywater, in an ‘æsthetic’ gown of flame-hued Kanitra silk edged with Armousky fur (to possess a dear woolly Armousk as a pet, is considered chic this season), while over her brain—an intellectual caprice, I wonder?—I saw a tinsel bow.... She is a daughter of the fortieth Lord Seafairer of Sevenelms-Park (so famous for its treasures) and is very artistic and literary having written several novels of English life under her maiden name of Victoria Gellybore-Frinton:—She inherits considerable cleverness also from her Mother. Dancing indefatigably (as she always does!) Miss Ivy Something seemed to be thoroughly enjoying her Father’s ball: I hear on excellent authority there is no foundation in the story of her engagement to a certain young Englishman, said to be bound ere long for the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah. Among the late arrivals were the Duke and Duchess of Varna—she all in golden tissues: they came together with Madame Wetme, who is one of the new hostesses of the season you know, and they say has bought the Duke of Varna’s palatial town-house in Samaden Square——”
“There,” the Archduchess murmured, drawing her wraps about her with a sneeze: “she has said quite enough now I think about my toilette!”
But the illustrious Eva was in unusual fettle, and only closed her notebook towards Dawn, when the nib of her pen caught fire.