Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/67

Rh determined the triumph of her arrival, a strange, charming little red-haired, black-dressed woman, with the face of a baby and the authority of a commodore. She took on the spot the discreet, the exceptional young governess into the confidence of her designs and, still more, of her doubts; intimating that it was a policy she almost always promptly pursued.

'To-morrow and Thursday are all right,' she said frankly to Charlotte on the second day, 'but I'm not half satisfied with Friday.'

'What improvement then do you suggest?'

'Well, my strong point, you know, is tableaux vivants.'

'Charming. And what is your favourite character?'

'Boss!' said Mrs. Guy with decision; and it was very markedly under that ensign that she had, within a few hours, completely planned her campaign and recruited her troop. Every word she uttered was to the point, but none more so than, after a general survey of their equipment, her final inquiry of Charlotte. She had been looking about, but half appeased, at the muster of decoration and drapery. 'We shall be dull. We shall want more colour. You've nothing else?'

Charlotte had a thought. 'No—I've some things.'

'Then why don't you bring them?'

The girl hesitated. 'Would you come to my room?'

'No,' said Mrs. Guy—'bring them to-night to mine.'

So Charlotte, at the evening's end, after candlesticks had nickered through brown old passages bedward, arrived at her friend's door with the burden of her aunt's relics. But she promptly expressed a fear. 'Are they too garish?'

When she had poured them out on the sofa Mrs. Guy was but a minute, before the glass, in clapping on the diadem. 'Awfully jolly—we can do Ivanhoe!'

'But they're only glass and tin.'

'Larger than life they are, rather!—which is exactly what, for tableaux, is wanted. Our jewels, for historic scenes, don't tell—the real thing falls short. Rowena must have rubies