Slowly the taxi-man unbuttoned his coat and put the coin away in an inner pocket. He watched her as she crossed the dirty street, placing her feet with a meticulous precision one after the other in the same straight line, as though she were treading a knife edge between goodness only knew what invisible gulfs. Floating she seemed to go, with a little spring at every step and the skirt of her summery dress—white it was, with a florid pattern printed in black all over it—blowing airily out around her swaying march. Decayed gentlewomen indeed! The driver started his machine with an unnecessary violence; he felt, for some reason, positively indignant.
Between the broad double-doors through which the horses passed to their fodder and repose were little narrow human doors—for the Yahoos, Lypiatt used to say in his large allusive way; and when he said it he laughed with the loud and bell-mouthed cynicism of one who sees himself as a misunderstood and embittered Prometheus. At one of these little Yahoo doors Mrs. Viveash halted and rapped as loudly as a small and stiff-hinged knocker would permit. Patiently she waited; several small and dirty children collected to stare at her. She knocked again and again waited. More children came running up from the farther end of the mews; two young girls of fifteen or sixteen appeared at a neighbouring doorway and immediately gave tongue in whoops of mirthless, hyena-like laughter.
“Have you ever read about the pied piper of Hamelin?” Mrs. Viveash asked the nearest child. Terrified, it shrank away. “I thought not,” she said, and knocked again.
There was a sound, at last, of heavy feet slowly descending steep stairs; the door opened.
“Welcome to the palazzo!” It was Lypiatt’s heroic formula of hospitality.
“Welcome at last,” Mrs. Viveash corrected, and followed him up a narrow, dark staircase that was as steep as a ladder. He was dressed in a velveteen jacket and linen trousers that should have been white, but needed washing. He was dishevelled and his hands were dirty.
“Did you knock more than once?” he asked, looking back over his shoulder.
“More than twenty times,” Mrs. Viveash justifiably exaggerated.
“I’m infinitely sorry,” protested Lypiatt. “I get so deeply absorbed in my work, you know. Did you wait long?”
“The children enjoyed it, at any rate.” Mrs. Viveash was irritated by a suspicion, which was probably, after all, quite unjustified, that Casimir had been rather consciously absorbed in his work; that he had heard her first knock and plunged the more profoundly into those depths of absorption where the true artist always dwells, or at any rate ought to dwell; to rise at her third appeal with a slow, pained reluctance, cursing, perhaps, at the importunity of a world which thus noisily interrupted the flow of his inspiration. “Queer, the way they stare at one,” she went on, with a note in her dying voice of a petulance that the children had not inspired. “Does one look such a guy?”