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"I wouldn't regret it," said Linda, "if I took Eileen by the shoulders and shook her till I shook the rouge off her cheek, and the brilliantine off her hair, and a million mean little subterfuges out of her soul. You know Eileen is lovely when she is natural, and if she would be straight-off-the-bat square, I would be proud to be her sister.
The dampness of the mould had caused the rust, hence before we could open the iron door we were compelled to oil the key with some brilliantine which was discovered on the dead man's dressing table. The interior, we found, was a kind of small strong-room built of fire-brick, and lined with steel. It was filled with papers of all kinds neatly arranged.
The man took the parcel and laid it on one of the narrow marble tables placed before a mirror in a richly gilt frame. He pushed aside the blue glass powder-box, the vial of brilliantine and the brushes. Vjera untied the bit of faded ribband herself and opened the package. The contents exhaled a faint, sickly odour. A tress of beautiful hair, of unusual length and thickness, lay in the paper.
She was n't looking her best that day, she knew; the cotton dresses that seemed so pretty at home were common and countrified here, and her best black cashmere looked cheap and shapeless beside Miss Dix's brilliantine. Miss Dix's figure was her strong point, and her dressmaker was particularly skillful in the arts of suggestion, concealment, and revelation. Beauty has its chosen backgrounds.
"Did you notice that he was very clean, and that his hair was sleeked down with brilliantine? They are invited to bring Peter to tea at the Miss Watsons', and are in great spirits about it. They generally hate going out to tea, but Jock discovered recently that the Watsons had a father who was a sea captain. That fact has thrown such a halo round the two ladies that he can't keep away from them.
He had ceased to brilliantine his once sleek hair, and dust and crumbs were allowed to collect in each fold of his clerical waistcoat. As we of the Set buzzed richly away in taxicabs, I saw him in a shabby arabeah between two old ladies, gazing wistfully after us. He was envying me Enid!
"I will accompany you, Miss Lacey." Minty, though she said no word, prepared to follow, apparently not able to remove her round gaze from the visitor. "You may make the toast, Minty," said her mother warningly, and the child took a reluctant step backward. Sylvia followed the brilliantine up a narrow staircase. "You're from Boston, I presume, Miss Lacey?" "Yes, just now," returned Sylvia.
She had covered her little old curled leaf of a hat with a tea-colored corner that had been left, and puffed it up high and light to the point of the new style, with brown veil tissue that also floated off in an abundant cloudy grace behind; and she had such an air of breezy and ecstatic elegance as she came beaming and hastening into the early car, that nobody really looked down to see that the underskirt was the identical black brilliantine that had done service all the spring in the dismal mornings of waterproofs and india-rubbers and general damp woolen smells and blue nips and shivers.
All that paint and powder and lipstick and brilliantine could do to make the ponderous, big woman more ghastly had been done, but in the rush of the long ride through which her husband had forced her, the colors had mixed and slipped, the false waves were displaced. She was not in any condition to criticize the appearance of another woman.
She had rinsed it in four relays of hot water, two of lukewarm and one of cold; she had dried it with the hard towel for the scalp and the soft towel for the hair. She had rubbed brilliantine in to give it the approved gloss.
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