Page:Sidnay McCall--The breath of gods.djvu/17
sounded feminine, young, full of excitement. "Heavens!" Miss Gwendolen de Lancy Todd was crying, "where on earth is my other glove? I am sure I just laid it here! And my orchids! Has anybody sat on my orchids? I think I'll have to marry the young person who sent them, though I forget now who it was!"
"A person of the name Dodge, n'est-ce-pas?" ventured the little French dressmaker, on her knees beside the fair white vision. Pins, retained at the corners of her mouth, added a crushed softness to the pronunciation. She rhymed it with "targe."
"Yes, a name like that, I believe," said Gwendolen, indifferently, and craned her long neck over. "Mother called him some sort of a snip. Are you certain that my dress hangs right now, Madame?"
"Oui, oui. It is perfection," declared Madame, sticking the remaining pins into the black front of her dress.
"Then at last I am actually ready. I believe there's mother calling now. Where did Yuki go? Oh, I see, over there by the window, as calm and cool as if we were going to church instead of to our first ball!"
"Then all my coolness is stopping on my outsides," said the Japanese girl, with a little incipient shrug and giggle, breaking at once into the merriest of low laughs. She crossed the room swiftly, with an unusual, swaying rhythm of movement.
"Ah, Gwendolen, my heart it go like yellow butterflies to be downstairs."
Gwendolen turned a radiant face to greet her. "Now isn't she a vision!" cried the girl aloud, in fresh access of admiration for her friend. "Madame, what do you think those French painters of yours would say to her—Chavannes, De Monvel, Besnard,—who owe so much to Yuki's art?"
"You omit Monsieur Le Beau, who is a painter," said the little woman, shyly. She was on good terms with the girls, and had made Yuki, as well as Gwendolen, chic gowns with the breath of Paris upon them. "I knew well the family of Monsieur Le Beau in France," she hurried on, seeing the distressed flush in Yuki's face. "Non, non, Mamselles. I am a chattering old femme. Let me look at you together before you