Page:The Tattooed Countess (1924).pdf/80

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talk to the Ladies' Home Study Club and mentioned the name of nearly every painter who is represented in the Louvre. I don't see how she remembered them all!

I was looking for more style, too, Miss Darrell continued. She isn't a bit fin de seekle. That's just a simple, summer dress.

Did you notice her slippers? Mrs. Sinclair queried, in her tremulous, timid voice, long pointed slippers like dudes wear here. I must say I prefer American fashions. I think we do about as well in Maple Valley, everything considered, as they do anywhere in the world.

Miss Darrell beamed at this indirect compliment. I get all the fashion-books the world over, she asserted, and compare them, and then I select the best details, but my dresses are all original. No two alike. No lady that I dress can ever say that she has seen any one else wearing the same model. She might look from—she waved her chubby arms, a fork in one hand, in a vague gesture suggesting infinite space—Paris to Chicago and never would she see the same model.

You really do marvels, continued Mrs. Sinclair. When I was in Chicago last winter I saw nothing so fin de siècle as the dress you made for me last year to wear at the McEvoy wedding. Do you remember my blue satin trimmed with forget-me-nots?

Do I remember? Miss Jelliffe was almost in-