Lady Kilmarny wrote a line to Lady Turnour, and asked if she might bring a maid to be interviewed—­a young woman whom she could recommend.  The note was sent down to the bride (who of course had the best suite in the hotel, on the first floor) and presently an answer came—­saying that Her Ladyship would be pleased to receive Lady Kilmarny and the person in question.

Suddenly I felt that I must go alone.  “Please leave me to my fate,” I said.  “I should be too self-conscious if you were with me.  Probably I should laugh in her face, or do something dreadful.”

“Very well,” Lady Kilmarny agreed.  “Perhaps you’re right.  Say that I sent you, and that, though you’ve never been with me, friends of mine know all about you.  You might tell her that you were to have travelled with the Princess Boriskoff.  That will impress her.  She would kiss the boot of a Princess.  Afterward, come up and tell me how you got on with ‘Her Ladyship.’”

I was stupid to be nervous, and told myself so; but as I knocked at the door of the suite reserved for Millionaires and other Royalties, my heart was giving little ineffective jumps in my breast, like—­as my old nurse used to say—­“a frog with three legs.”

“Come in!” called a voice with sharp, jagged edges.

I opened the door.  In a private drawing-room as different as the personality of one woman from another, sat Lady Turnour.  She faced me as I entered, so I had a good look at her, before casting down my eyes and composing my countenance to the self-abnegating meekness which I conceived fitting to a femme de chambre comme il faut.

She was enthroned on a sofa.  One could hardly say less, there was so much of her, and it was all arranged as perfectly as if she were about to be photographed.  No normal woman, merely sitting down, with no other object than to be comfortable, would curve the tail of her gown round in front of her like a sickle; or have just the point of one shoe daintily poised on a footstool; or the sofa-cushions at exactly the right angle behind her head to make a background; or the finger with all her best rings on it, keeping the place in an English illustrated journal.

I dared not believe that she had posed for me.  It must have been for Lady Kilmarny; and that I alone should see the picture was a bad beginning.

She is of the age when a woman can still tell people that she is forty, hoping they will exclaim politely, “Impossible!”

It is not enough for her to be a Ladyship and a millionairess.  She will be a beauty as well, or at all costs she will be looked at.  To that end are her eyebrows and lashes black as jet, her undulated hair crimson, her lips a brighter shade of the same colour, and her skin of magnolia pallor, like the heroines of the novels which are sure to be her favourites.  Once, she must have been handsome, a hollyhock queen of a kitchen-garden kingdom; but she would be far more attractive now if only she had “abdicated,” as nice middle-aged women say in France.