It afforded great diversion to the Spanish group to see the Englishwomen gravely take out a newspaper, as large as a sheet, from their pockets, and read it from the first word to the last.
Pilar had been unable to persuade Lucía to accompany her to the Salle des Dames; the shyness and timidity resulting from her provincial education deterred her from going; she dreaded, more than fire, the inquisitive glances of those women, who examined her toilet as minutely as a skillful confessor examines the recesses of the conscience of his penitent. Pilar, on the contrary, was there in her natural element. Her rather shrill voice yielded in power only to the Cuban lisp of the leader, Lola Amézega.
“Well, I bought this to-day,” Lola was saying unconstrainedly, as she turned up the sleeve of her pink muslin gown, trimmed with dark garnet bows, and displaying to view a bracelet, from which hung a little pig with curled-up tail and swelling sides, executed in fine enamel.
“I have one in another style,” said Amalia Amézega, showing a pig no less resplendent than her sister’s, which dug its snout into the lace of her necktie.
“Heavens! what an ugly fashion!” exclaimed Luisa Natal, a belle whose attractions were now on the wane, and who was very careful to use no ornaments except such as might serve to enhance her beauty. “For my part, I would not wear such creatures. They make one think of black-pudding, don’t they, countess?”
The Countess of Monteros, a Spanish woman of the old-fashioned type, very devout and somewhat austere, nodded in the affirmative.
“I don’t know what they are going to invent next,” she said slowly. “I have seen in the shops, elephants, lizards, frogs, and toads, and even spiders,--in short, the most disgusting creatures possible,--as ornaments for young ladies. In my youthful days we had no fancy for such oddities; fine brilliants, beautiful pearls, a ruby heart--and, yes, we wore cameos, also, but it was a charming caprice--one had one’s likeness or that of some virgin or saint engraved on the stone.”
There was a brief silence; the Amézegas, subjugated by the imperiousness of that authoritative voice, did not venture to reply.
“See, countess,” said Pilar, at last, delighted to have an opportunity to enrage the Amézegas, “what is really pretty is that pin of Luisa’s.”