"Why, I am awfully nice!" she cried, delighted with the picture. "I'll never know myself! Do get off your things, Norn, I'm crazy to see how you look."
Elinor, helped by Miss Jinny, shed her wrappings and stood revealed as a lovely Princess of China, with billowing draperies and flashing glass jewels and a tiny filet sparking on her dark hair. Some of the swarm about the mirrors turned at Patricia's exclamation, and with generous admiration pressed back upon themselves so that for a moment the dark, serious beauty of the Princess of China flashed out at Elinor from the long oblong of the glass, filling her lovely eyes with a gratified light and flushing her tinted cheeks a deeper pink.
"How sweet of you to let me see!" she cried impulsively to the houris and queens and beggar-maids that had given her the brief tribute. "I don't believe I know any of you, but I'm just as much obliged as----"
She broke off in amazement at the familiar grin of one of the most glittering queens. "Griffin, of all people!" she cried, delightedly, and held out an eager hand.
The sultana, speaking with decidedly un-oriental diction, came shimmering over to them, and shook hands with occidental heartiness.
"This is what I call luck," she said, genially. "I'm going to steer you two peaches right into the thick of the tumult, and if you don't have the time of your sad young lives, my name's not--well, here, you'd better pronounce it for me," and she handed out a card on which was printed in clear black letters,
THE SULTANA KEHERRYSEENOGASSOLEHENNELECTRIZADE (OTHERWISE KNOWN AS THE LIGHT OF THE HARUMSCARUM)
Patricia and Elinor puckered their brows over it, but Miss Jinny, craning her head over their shoulders, gave a snort.
"Pooh, that's as easy as rolling off a log," she said, with a toss of her turban. "If you'd added acetylene and alcohol you'd made it a bit longer."
Griffin grinned amiably at the whiskered countenance. "Good for you, old top," she responded, cheerfully. "You ought to go into the Sunday puzzle department. You'd be hung all over with gold-filled watches. Where did you blow in from?"
Miss Jinny had been quietly removing her outer coverings and as Griffin spoke she dropped her last concealing wrap, and stepped out in turban and embroidered jacket, vermillion girdle and wide, baggy blue trousers whose voluminous folds almost hid the vermillion and gold tips of her curling slippers. A simitar was thrust fiercely through the flaming girdle, and a gaudy hookah cuddled in the crook of her arm, while the bristling whiskers and encarmined cheeks and nose of the weather-beaten seafarer proclaimed a strong masculine personality in striking contrast to the pretty young men Turks and Persians that tittered in feminine fashion all about her.