“I adore the Russians,” cried Justine with conviction.
“Have you known many?” asked Minna sarcastically.
“When one knows one thoroughly, one knows them all,” said Justine.
The soothing charm of a long and protracted toilette enlivened by Justine’s somewhat intimate account of the one Russian whom she knew thoroughly, beguiled the time and restored Minna to good humour. When she left Justine’s hands, adorned in the most fascinating of Paris dresses, with her diamond star in her dark hair, and looked at herself in the pier-glass, she was almost happy. She was young, and to most eyes, especially her own, captivatingly beautiful. The ravages that the past ordeal had made in her beauty had been repaired by time. Her lips were as ripely pouting, her dark eyes as slumberous, her lazy lids as sensuous, as when she had first deliberately woven their glamour around Hugh, long, long ago. Furthermore, she had ripened into maturer womanhood.
“Mademoiselle is ravishing,” said Justine.
Minna sighed. “And to think that it’s all going to be wasted to-night—positively wasted.”
“Mademoiselle will command the admiration of the whole house.”
Minna laughed contemptuously. What would be the gratification of that?
“It would please me enormously if I were in the place of Mademoiselle,” said Justine.
A little later Minna descended with her guest to the great dining-room. Mrs. Delamere was a faded, aristocratic looking woman, with an aquiline nose and a perfect taste in dress. She looked at her charge critically, noticed her unabashed and somewhat inviting acceptance of admiring glances, and imperceptibly shrugged her shoulders. Rather than linger in the Bloomsbury boarding-house, where for the past year she had been hiding her fallen fortunes, she would have undertaken to chaperon the Unmentionable Person of Babylon herself. Meanwhile she intended to enjoy her dinner.