For the dress! That surpassing man Jean Worth had said once, not to herself, but to some other customer, and no friend of hers, that it was a real pleasure to dress Lady Conybeare; and Lady Conybeare, on her side, kindly considered it a real pleasure to be dressed by Worth. Thus the gratification was mutual, and it must have been a consolation to the dressmaker, if he had to whistle long and loud for his cheque, to have his artistic pleasure to fall back on. Now Kit – a rare accomplishment – could stand orange, and to stand orange means to be admirably suited to orange. She loved it herself, Jean genuinely agreed with her, and in this dress four tints of orange chiffon, Dantè, faisan doré, Vésuve, and pomme d'or, blazed together. Even Worth, the greatly daring, had inwardly felt a qualm of audacity, but how admirably, when Kit was inside the gown, had his audacity succeeded! "Réussi!" he would have sighed had he seen it. Over all was a fine net of pale mandarin yellow, to which was tacked a cusped acanthus pattern of sequins; and Kit, looking at herself long and critically in her wardrobe glass, said "Lor'!" Her glorious red-gold hair, full of dusky flames, of a tint after which Nature blindly gropes where Paris leads the way, was the point to which Worth had worked, and his success was beyond all approval or praise.
Next came the question of jewels, and Hortense, her maid, with the artist's eye, thought that pearls and pearls only, pas un diamant, would be consummately chic. Kit saw what she meant, and from an artistic point of view devoutly agreed, but she turned up her nose at the suggestion. "We don't want to be chic, my good woman," she said. "We want to hit 'em in the eye. The rubies, Hortense!"
Now, the rubies were really fine, glorious molten lakes of colour, almost barbarically splendid, and being entailed, they had been forced to remain in the Conybeare coffers. But if ever a woman and her dress were designed and built for rubies, Kit and this creation were. Hortense, moved beyond her wont, ejaculated "Mon Dieu!" as the gorgeous baubles were clasped on Kit's dazzling neck; and her mistress, being as candid with herself as she was with her husband, smiled serenely at her own reflection.
"A touch of rouge," she said to Hortense, and when that was unerringly applied, "There," she murmured, "that will double up the City. And Jack," she added to herself, "will then proceed to pick its pockets."
She rustled across the floor, and tapped at the door of her husband's dressing-room.
"Are you ready, Jack?" she asked.
"Yes, just. Come in, Kit."
Kit took from her table the orange-red fan which Worth had sent with the dress, threw the door open and held her head very high.
"The gold-miner's wife," she remarked.
Her husband looked at her a moment in blank admiration. Seven years' husband as he was, Kit still occasionally "knocked him over" as he expressed it, and she knocked him over now. Then he laughed outright.
"That ought to fetch 'em," he said frankly.
"So I think," said Kit; "but really, Jack, it was a sacrifice putting this on. Remember that, please. I was keeping it for the royalties next week, but you said 'very gorgeous,' and I obeyed."
"Oh, blow the royalties!" said Jack. "Dress in tartan plaid for them, or a kilt even. Besides, it is bad form for a hostess to be better dressed than her guests. That dress wouldn't do at all, Kit, in your own house. They would think you were an advanced Radical."
The India-rubber-tired brougham, with its little electric lamp in the roof (Kit's only real extravagance for more than ten days, as she triumphantly told Jack) was ready when they got downstairs, and they rolled off into the gaslit roar of the streets. This way and that flashed the gleaming lights of hansoms and carriages; it was like passing through an August shower of shooting-stars. Long queues of waiting folk stretched like snakes from the pit-doors of theatres; newsboys roared their "'orrible and revoltin'" details; jewellers' shops with windows a blaze of gems signalled and winked across the streets; feathered women peacocked along, making eyes at the passers; loungers lounged; busy little men with black bags made scurrying bee-lines across the crowded roadway; buses, a plaster of advertisements, swung nodding on their way; and bicycles glided by them so spare and silent that they might have been incorporeal things. High up on house-roofs glowed the changing colours of prima-donna soaps, putting to shame the lesser lights of heaven; now an invisible gigantic penman would write Kodak with large flowing hand in red ink, then, dissatisfied, delete it, and try it again in yellow. Here the crystal signs of music-halls flashed diamonds, or the open door of a restaurant cast a brilliant square of light on to the street. Then for a moment a strident, diabolically-precise scale from a street-organ would overscore all other noises; but the hoofs and wheels which bore the hungry world to the houses of its friends to be fed reasserted itself with a crash and trample like some Valkürie-ritt; the whole town was abroad, and humming like a swarming beehive.
Kit was never tired of the spectacle of life, provided it was gay, and varied, and full. The incessant movement, the infinite separate businesses, which went to make up the great major chord of London streets, the admirable pace at which the world moved, the marvel of its contrasts, the gas, the glitter, the sordidness and the splendour rubbing shoulders, all appealed to her tremendous joie de vivre, the best and the most unvarying factor in her very living character. She had once expressed a wish to be buried, like a suicide at cross-roads, in the very centre of Piccadilly Circus. "No country churchyards or knells of parting day for me, thank you," she had said.
All down Piccadilly she was silent, looking devouringly from the window of the brougham at the kaleidoscope outside, but when they turned out of Trafalgar Square down Northumberland Avenue, to avoid the Strand, which at that hour spouts and bubbles with traffic like a weir in spring, she turned to her husband with a sigh of regret at leaving the fuller streets.
"The outline of the plot, Jack?" she said.
"Don't know it myself yet," said Jack. "But the vieux premier is Alington – a heavy, solemn man, like a butler, rather tiresome, I'm afraid. Very likely you will sit next him; he is a guest of the Drapers' like ourselves. If not, get hold of him somehow. He might dine to-morrow."
"But we give a dance to-morrow," said Kit, "and we feed only the very brightest and best."
"All the more reason for Alington coming, perhaps," said Jack. "I have heard it said that there are still a few people who care for a duke as such. It sounds odd, but let us hope he is one."
"Yes, those people are so easy to deal with," said Kit thoughtfully. "But it will upset the table, Jack."
"Of course, if you put your table as more important than possible thousands," said Jack.
"It is really a big thing then?" asked Kit.
"It is possibly a very big thing. I know no more than you yet. It may even run to a Saturday till Monday or more."
"Very good. I'll upset the whole apple-cart for it, as Mr. Rhodes says. Here we are. Let's get away early, Jack. I said we'd go to Berkeley Street afterwards."
"We'll go as early as we can," he replied. "But you mustn't risk not landing your fish because you don't play him long enough."
"Oh, Jack, I am not a fool," she said. "Order the carriage for ten. I'd undertake in this gown to land the whole house of laymen by ten without a gaff. Dear Jean Worth! What a lot of money I owe him, and what a lot of pleasure he gives me! I should be puzzled to say which was the greater."
CHAPTER II
SUNDAY MORNING
Mr. Frank Alington turned out to be a star of greater magnitude, in fact a Saturday till Monday star, almost a comet. Lord Conybeare found that the whirl and bustle of London did not allow of his seeing enough of him, so he phrased it, and thus it happened that, some ten days