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The Outrage
The Outrage
BOOK I
CHAPTER I
Chérie was ready first. She flung her striped bath-robe over her shoulders and picked up Amour who was wriggling and barking at her pink heels.
"Au revoir dans l'eau," she said to little Mireille and to the German nursery governess, Frieda.
"Oh, Frieda, vite, vite, dégrafez-moi," cried Mireille, backing towards the hard-faced young woman and indicating a jumble of knotted tapes hanging down behind her.
"Speak English, please, both. This is our English day," said Frieda, standing in her petticoat-bodice in front of the mirror and removing what the girls called her "Wurst" from the top of her head. In the glass she caught sight of Chérie making for the door and called her back sharply. "Mademoiselle Chérie, you go not in the street without your stockings and your hat."
"Nonsense, Frieda! In Westende every one goes to bathe like this," and Chérie waved a bare shapely limb and flicked her pink toes at Amour, who barked wildly at them.
"I do not care how every one goes. You go not," said Frieda Rothenstein, hanging her sleek brown Wurst carefully on the mirror-stand.
"Then what have we come here for?" sulked Chérie, dropping Amour and giving him a soft kick with her bare foot.
"We have come here," quoth Frieda, "not for marching our undressed legs about the streets, but for the enjoyment both of the summer-freshness and of the out-view." Whereupon Mireille gave a sudden shriek of laughter and Amour bounded round her and barked.
Chérie crossed the room to the chair on which her walking clothes had been hastily flung. "Won't sand-shoes do?"
"No. Sand-shoes and stockings," said Frieda. "And hat," she added, glancing down at the comely bent head with its cascade of waving red-brown locks.