She pursed her lips, she scratched her forehead thoughtfully, and so pushed her false front over to a most rakish angle. But the old man shuffled across the room, and with a: "Permettez that I correct the coiffure, my Angelique! It have slide, and it make a little of what you call the--the 'jaky' look! That way--so!" And with the palms of both hands he calmly replaced the foxy-red front, and the search for a color suitable for the first act went on. Thrall, drawing his hand lightly across the loosened folds of many webs, over purples, mauves, ambers, with a snapping accompaniment of "No! no! no!" paused, by merest chance, at a delicate blue brocade, at which Angelique almost shrieked: "No! no!--I say no! Pretty? Yes, mais too calm--cool--collected--obedient! Ah, bah! A fool color! What, that amber would become her? Hear you that, old man?" She appealed to Lefebvre with up-cast hands: "Y-es, and it would be Spanish in effect! Oh, what _is_ it that we want?" The old man squinted up his eyes, and, studying Sybil, answered: "Something happy, v-e-r-y happy! Something like a flower, a-a very early flower--but what?" And Thrall, who had caught the old snuff-taker's idea, asked, quickly: "Why not the blossom of the peach? That's early!" "God bless the man!" cried Nonna Angelique, throwing her arms about him in frantic demonstration of delight. "It is the coup-de-grâce! The pinks, mon mari! vite! vite done! Vraiment you have the head still! A happy color, said you!" She threw out a fold of satin her husband offered: "Non! non! it is too deep--too common!" Another: "Bah! too pale, but mere flesh color!" A beautiful bright pink brocade next was tried. "Oh, non! non!" she almost cried from disappointment; "too-'er, too-'er!" In despair she resorted to pantomime to help make her meaning clear, and, catching up her skimpy alpaca skirt, she danced a wild step or two, saying: "Too comme-ça! too what you call 'frisky,' eh? You feel me, what I mean? But that sweet, first flowering thing--that soft promise of the spring, that peach-blossom pink, that would make this dark girl beautiful--can I not find it, then?" She beat her breast with Gallic despair. Lefebvre clutched his few hairs, and apparently pulled up a memory, and cried: "One chance more! The old chest with Eastern things! India, China, Japan!" He disappeared--he lost a shoe, but left it lying till he came back, and slid into it in passing. Some rolls were cast down, soft, non-crackling paper removed, and, with cries of joy and gurgles of delight, Nonna Angelique flung out, fold upon fold, a silky crêpe of so pure and true a peach-blossom pink that the petals of the flower itself scattered over it could hardly have been perceived.