“So do I.” And I burst out laughing. This time, however, my breathing triumphantly stood the strain. “So do I. But not unripe ones,” I added, gasping with mirth. It seemed to me that nothing funnier had ever been said.
And then Mrs. Aldwinkle stepped definitely into my life. For, looking round, still heaving with the after-swell of my storm of laughter, I suddenly saw the Chinese lantern lady of the patino standing before me. Her flame-coloured costume, a little less radiant now that it was wet, still shone among the aquarium shadow of her green parasol, and her face looked as though it were she who had been drowned, not I.
“They tell me that you’re an Englishman,” she said in the same ill-controlled, unmusical voice I had heard, not long since, misquoting Shelley.
Still tipsy, still light-headed with convalescence, I laughingly admitted it.
“I hear you were nearly drowned.”
“Quite right,” I said, still laughing; it was such a marvellous joke.
“I’m most sorry to hear….” She had a way of leaving her sentences unfinished. The words would tail off into a dim inarticulate blur of sound.
“Don’t mention it,” I begged her. “It isn’t at all disagreeable, you know. Afterwards, at any rate….” I stared at her affectionately and with my convalescent’s boundless curiosity. She stared back at me. Her eyes, I thought, must have the same bulge as those little red lenses one screws to the rear forks of bicycles; they collected all the light diffused around them and reflected it again with a concentrated glitter.
“I came to ask whether I could be of any assistance,” said the Chinese lantern lady.
“Most kind.”