Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/239

 chinned—bulging eyes, and full lower lip, who was listening to what Tessie, playing up to him, was saying. The other side of him was the queerest-looking woman. Tall, with broad shoulders and enormous hanging bosom, tightly corseted and wearing a high-collared maroon lace gown, she had a flat-backed hawknosed small head on top of which was a coronet of false mahogany-color braids.

"And who's that fascinating woman on the other side of Lyle?" Hal was asking.

"Mrs. Cornwallis. You were out the day she came to call," said Figente.

"You never mentioned her—when was that?"

"Last week. Nino, the Marqués de Mendez y Avila—the dark man next to her—brought her. He's an old friend, and this Mrs. Cornwallis thinks he and Piselli can do business. The Mendez red wines are quite good, better but not so well known as certain Bordeaux. I hear she's quite—a middlewoman." He tittered. "In fact she even tried to nick me. I was showing them some of my things and she mentioned that Prince Gregorovitch was hard up in Nice and was planning to sell a Cellini cup. I said I knew him and the cup and that both were copies, the cup French 18th century, and the Prince a Georgian whose father was a village chief. He promoted himself to Prince after he escaped from the Bolsheviki. She was quick enough not to insist. It seems she has acted as go-between in introducing American parvenus to European third-class titles, and paintings. Her greatest coup to date was marrying off a middlewest merchant's daughter, with an astronomical dowry, to a Papal count."

"But who is she?" persisted Hal.

"No one knows much about her. She's American, sounds Western. She turned up about three years ago with tottering Countess von und zu Schwitzenburg. I knew Hilda in Potsdam before the war and thought her feeble-minded. Be that as it may, Cornwallis seems to have helped her out of Germany with her money when the inflation was at its height. Against the law, you know. They stayed with Hilda's relatives in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. From then on she had an entree, so to speak, even achieving the heights of the Faubourg Saint-Figente." He noted pleasurably that Boswell, laughing a little too loudly, thought it funny too.

"You really do know everyone!" Hal marveled. The respectful greetings his patron had received this night were a revelation. From Rh