[Illustration:  “While I wrestled ... with a bodice as snug as the head of a drum, the lord of all it contained appeared in the doorway”]

“As if that had anything to do with it!  She may as well understand, to begin with, that I won’t put up with impudence and answering back.  Hair that colour doesn’t go with dark eyes.  And eyelashes like that aren’t suitable to lady’s-maids.”

“If your ladyship pleases, what am I to do with mine?” I asked in the sweetest little voice; and I would have given anything for someone to whom I might have telegraphed a laugh.

“Wash the dark stuff off of them and let them be light,” were the simple instructions promptly returned to me.

There was no more to be said, so I cast down the offending features (are one’s lashes one’s features?) and swallowed my feelings just as Lady Turnour will have to swallow my hair and eyelashes if I’m to stop in her service.  If they stick in her throat, I suppose she will discharge me.  For a leopard cannot change his spots, and a girl will not the colour of her locks and lashes—­when she happens to be fairly well satisfied with Nature’s work.

CHAPTER VI

Pamela’s mother-in-law, la Comtesse douairiere, wears a lovely, fluffy white thing over her own diminishing front hair, which I once heard her describe, when struggling to speak English, as her “combination.”  Pam and I laughed nearly to extinction, but I didn’t laugh this morning when I was obliged to help Lady Turnour put on hers.

They say an emperor is no hero to his valet, and neither can an empress be a heroine to her maid when she bursts for the first time upon that humble creature’s sight, without her transformation.

It did make an unbelievable difference with her ladyship; and it must have been a blow to poor Sir Samuel, after all his years of hopeless love for a fond gazelle, when at last he made that gazelle his own, and saw it running about its bedroom with all its copper-coloured “ondulations” naively lying on its dressing-table.

Poor Miss Paget’s false front was one of those frank, self-respecting old things one might have allowed one’s grandmother to wear, just as she would wear a cap; but a transformation—­well, one has perhaps believed in it, if one has not the eye of a lynx, and the disillusion is awful.

Of course, a lady’s-maid is not a human being, and what it is thinking matters no more than what thinks a chair when sat upon; so I don’t suppose “her ladyship” cared ten centimes for the impression I was receiving and trying to digest in the first ten minutes after my morning entrance.

As my hair waves naturally, I’ve scarcely more than a bowing acquaintance with a curling-iron; but luckily for me I always did Cousin Catherine’s when she wanted to look as beautiful as she felt; and though my hands trembled with nervousness, I not only “ondulated” Lady Turnour’s transformation without burning it up, but I added it to her own locks in a manner so deft as to make me want to applaud myself.