She had come for a friendly little talk with Lilly several times before, though the two had not grown more intimate as a result. This time she arrived opportunely, to help them taste the joy of Lilly's fame. Her grey velvet suit shimmered in the afternoon sunlight, and the red turban with the waving aigrette nestled in her dark, curly head like a tongue of flame darting downward. She held her hand out to Lilly with her seductive smile, but when she turned to Richard, her eyes flashed with some of the energy with which she insisted upon her lover taking a dose. In the presence of strangers Lilly and Richard still kept up the myth of a Platonic friendship. So Richard modestly reached for his hat to extract from Lilly the polite request that he stay a little longer. But the small, dark woman anticipated them. "Don't be foolish," she said, "don't behave as if you weren't perfectly at home here. You may call each other by your first names, as if from a slip of the tongue, and I'll pretend not to have heard a thing." Lilly and Richard smiled, and while Lilly poured a cup of tea for her guest, Richard played with the paper. He wanted to make certain whether Mrs. Sievekingk had learned of the great triumph. "What I really came for was on account of that stuff," she said, "and you are the very person I want to speak to about it. I suppose you're awfully proud of it." Richard made a deprecating gesture, and smiled complacently. "To be quite frank, I credited you with a grain or two more sense." "I beg pardon," Richard observed, taken aback. Lilly started. Her dread of the morning grew into the suspicion that her great fortune had a cloven hoof. "Just let me speak," said the little woman, her eyes now flashing very steadily with a conscious purpose. "I have experience in such matters. My red-head began the same way with me. Has the thought never occurred to you, Mr. Dehnicke, that when a choice creature like this one sitting here, something so sweet and glorious that you'll never find her like, entrusts herself to you, you have assumed a vast responsibility? Do you think we're here to puff and swell your vanity? We're not factory girls or ballet dancers to be stuck into silks and laces and led around to show the world that you're a fine buck. We have fallen from society, I know, but we're not to be classed, not by a long shot, with those women to whose ranks you would like to reduce us." Richard wanted to reply, but could not find the right words, and Mrs. Sievekingk continued, bending toward Lilly tenderly: "So here comes a poor little mite in its unsuspecting aristocracy, and says: 'Take me. Do with me what you want.' And what will you do with her? You'll make a fast woman of her, at least what the world takes to be a fast woman. Don't contradict me. As a beginning you've already done very well." She pointed to the paper.