When everything was well displayed, the Bedouin and the negress sprang
up, lithe as leopards, and to Victoria's surprise began to undress her.
"Please let me do it myself!" she protested, but they did not listen or
understand, chattering her into silence, as if they had been lively
though elderly monkeys. Giggling over the hooks and buttons which were
comical to them, they turned and twisted her between their hands,
fumbling at neck and waist with black fingers, and brown fingers
tattooed blue, until she, too, began to laugh. She laughed herself into
helplessness, and encouraged by her wild merriment, and Lella M'Barka's
smiles and exclamations punctuated with fits of coughing, they set to
work at pulling out hairpins, and the tortoise-shell combs that kept the
Roumia's red gold waves in place. At last down tumbled the thick curly
locks which Stephen Knight had thought so beautiful when they flowed
round her shoulders in the Dance of the Shadow.
The invalid made her kneel, just as she was in her petticoat, in order
to pass long, ringed fingers through the soft masses, and lift them up
for the pleasure of letting them fall. When the golden veil, as Lella
M'Barka called it, had been praised and admired over and over again, the
order was given to braid it in two long plaits, leaving the ends to curl
as they would. Then, the game of dressing the doll could begin, but
first the embroidered petticoat of batiste with blue ribbons at the top
of its flounce, and the simple pretty little stays had to be examined
with keen interest.
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