CHAPTER X
At midnight the great supper party to celebrate the reconciliation of
Mr. Beamish and Duchess Susan broke up, and beneath a soft fair sky the
ladies, with their silvery chatter of gratitude for amusement, caught
Chloe in their arms to kiss her, rendering it natural for their cavaliers
to exclaim that Chloe was blest above mortals. The duchess preferred to
walk. Her spirits were excited, and her language smelt of her origin,
but the superb fleshly beauty of the woman was aglow, and crying, 'I
declare I should burst in one of those boxes--just as if you'd stalled
me!' she fanned a wind on her face, and sumptuously spread her spherical
skirts, attended by the vanquished and captive Colonel Poltermore, a
gentleman manifestly bent on insinuating sly slips of speech to serve for
here a pinch of powder, there a match. 'Am I?' she was heard to say.
She blew prodigious deep-chested sighs of a coquette that has taken to
roaring.
Presently her voice tossed out: 'As if I would!' These vivid
illuminations of the Colonel's proceedings were a pasture to the rearward
groups, composed of two very grand ladies, Caseldy, Mr. Beamish, a lord,
and Chloe.
'You man! Oh!' sprang from the duchess. 'What do I hear? I won't
listen; I can't, I mustn't, I oughtn't.'
So she said, but her head careened, she gave him her coy reluctant ear,
with total abandonment to the seductions of his whispers, and the lord
let fly a peal of laughter.
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