“‘I LIKE IT,’ HE PRONOUNCED. ‘THE NOTE IS SOMBER,
BUT IT IS EXCELLENT WORK’”
We had reached the main floor by this time.
“Mr. Derrizer, the Lady B.,” said Mrs. W., as she brought me forward to meet the ladies.
A modern suggestion of the fair Jehanne, tall, astonishingly lissome, done, as to clothes, after the best manner of the romanticists, such was the Lady B. A more fascinating type, from the point of view of stagecraft, I never saw. And the languor and lofty elevation of her gestures and eyebrows defy description. She could say, “Oh, I am so weary of all this!” with a slight elevation of her eyebrows a hundred times more definitely and forcefully than if it had been shouted for her in stentorian tones through a megaphone.
She gave me the fingers of an archly poised hand.
“It is a pleasure.”
“And Miss N., Mr. Derrizer.” Again it was Mrs. W. who spoke.
“I am very pleased.”
A pink, slim lily of a woman of twenty-eight or thirty, seemingly very fragile, very Dresden-china-like as to color, a dream of light and Tyrian blue with some white interwoven, very keen as to eye, the perfection of hauteur as to manner, so well-bred that her voice seemed subtly suggestive of it all—that was Miss N.
To say that I was interested in this company is putting it mildly. The three women were distinct, individual, characteristic each in a different way. The Lady B. was all peace and repose, statuesque, weary, dark. Miss N. was like a ray of sunshine, pure morning light, delicate, gay, mobile. Mrs. W. was of thicker texture, redder blood, more human fire. She had a vigor past the comprehension of either, if not their subtlety of intellect, which latter is often much better.