Re: Third class, dining.
The knockout had been hired to be pretty, not to be smart. Men didn’t like it when you were smart out in the open, they called you bitter. It was much better, the woman in the heavy fur and the spindly heels knew, to keep your mouth shut and to look pretty and to say something perfectly poisonous at the right (last) second when they had no choice but to listen. That was true, for Garbo and for now. The boat was from sometime when women didn’t do much talking at all. Maybe the mime had a point, it was easier to be deadly when you were quiet. Not that the little mime with her chic French haircut and her terrible attitude had much going for her but silence.
It had been calf’s leather. Calf’s leather beaten to the softness of whipped cream and there were plenty of things that were expensive and things that she could ruin at home - it was always smart never to love anything to the point that it couldn’t be ruined because things always were. No one died of a broken heart but they were tiresome. But she’d liked that bag and it bobbed now on its own little ocean, dribs and drabs of salt water that dribbled over her bare toes and plinked against the crisp shellac of her toenails. The femme fatale wiggled her foot, and she didn’t care about the things being thrown all over the place, she felt like throwing things all over the place but she did care about the lipstick. Finding another one on a boat like this would be impossible.
She was quick, she shoved her own hand in and the porcelain-pretty wrist winked in and out of the gap in the soggy leather bag and retrieved the capped twist of a pretty lipstick, triumphantly. She could always find things in the dark, a neat trick when you needed to primp before an entrance. And now she was being used as a walking prop, that took her back. The little mime was rude, ruder than big-name directors and know-nothings who walked up on set and thought the world owed them something, but she angled the mirror so the blackened lines could be drawn with precision. Every woman deserved time to repair a bad make-up job, after all.
“Well you haven’t got words but you can talk plenty,” she advised, smartly. “Isn’t that the whole point?”