"One day you will not hate it. I will wait for that day. But—about your cigarette-case—you do not now tell me the truth! ... The real reason is more subtle. You carry that thing there—under your corsage—to make live men envious of an object that cannot feel!" "Really! ... What a lot you must know about women!" The words were mocking, but the voice that uttered them was big, warm, and velvety. Far above the ordinary stature of womanhood—you remember that Franky regarded her as a great galumphing creature—her head would yet have been much below the level of von Herrnung’s, but for the height of the extraordinary diadem or turban that crowned her masses of dull cloudy-black hair. Folds of vivid emerald-green satin rose above a wide band of theatrical gilt tinsel, set with blazing stage rubies, and above the centre of the wearer’s low, wide brow a fan-shaped panache of clipped white ospreys sprang, boldly challenging the eye. Thrown with royal prodigality upon the back of the chair she occupied was an opera-mantle of cotton-backed emerald-green velvet lavishly furred with ermine and sables that were palpably false as the garish gold and jewels of the diadem that crowned her, yet became her big, bold, rather brazen beauty as well as though the Siberian weasel and the Arctic marten had been trapped and slain to deck and adorn her, instead of the white rabbit of ordinary commerce and the domestic pussy-cat. *CHAPTER XI* *PATRINE SAXHAM* Who was the girl—the woman rather—who diffused around her so powerful a magnetic aura, whom prodigal Nature had dowered with such opulence of bodily splendour, that cheap, tawdry clothes and ornaments borrowed from her a magnificence that conjured up visions of the Salammbo of Flaubert, gleaming moon-like through her gold and purple tissues—of Anatole France’s Queen of Sheba treading the lapis-lazuli and sardonyx pavements of King Solomon’s palace in her jewelled sandals of gilded serpent-skin, darting fiery provocations from under the shadow of her painted lashes towards the Wise One rising from his cushions of purple byssus, between the golden lions of his ivory throne? What a voice the creature had! thought von Herrnung. Soft and velvety like that dead-white skin of hers. The tortoiseshell case he held in his big palm still glowed with the rich vital warmth of her. His blood tingled and raced in his veins; his hard, brilliant stare grew languorous, and his mouth relaxed into sensuousness. He said almost stupidly, so keen was his enjoyment: "You English ladies smoke a great deal, I think." "Why should we leave all the pleasant vices to the men?"