“Oh, that dam-panne, as I call it. No, it makes me look like my own maid. No offence to you, Miller.”
“I don’t intend to take any, my lady,” said Miller, pursing up her lips. “What about your black with sequins?”
“Yes, let’s have the vicious sequins. It will go with the child’s hair. You see, I dress to you, my dear.”
But I knew it was only that she likes things to go nicely together, just as she chooses her horses to be a pair.
Then she sat down and did her face, very neatly; it is about the only thing she does really well. She put red on her lips, and white on her nose, and black on her eyes, till she looked like a Siamese doll I once had before I licked the paint off. I paid particular attention, for I shall do it when I am grown-up, that is if I am able to afford it—the best paints—and I am told that stands you in about four hundred a year.
Her hair is the very newest gold shade, the one they have in Paris—rather purplish—it will be blue next season, I dare say! It is just a little bit dark down by the roots, which is pretty, I think, and looks so very natural. All the time Miller was dressing it, she worked away at the front with the stick of her comb, pulling little bits out, and putting them back, and staring into a hand-glass as anxiously as if her life depended on it, while Miller patiently gummed some little tendrils of hair down on her forehead.
“Child, child,” she said to me. “Do you know what makes me sigh?”
“Indigestion?” I asked, quite on the chance, but she said it wasn’t, that she never had had it, it was only because she felt so terribly, so diabolically, so preternaturally ugly.
“Oh no, you look sweet!” I said. I really thought so, but Miller grinned.
“You are delightful!” Lady Scilly said. “And you can have that boa you are fiddling with, if you like. Tulle is death to me! Makes me meretricious; and, child, when your time comes, don’t ever—ever—have anything to do with massage! It grows on one so! One can’t leave it off, and it has to be always with one, like the poor. I have actually to subsidize a masseuse to live round the corner, and she cheeks me all the time. Oh, la, la!”