"But we've paid, my dear," said Henry, gently protesting.
He, the strong male, took command of the morbidly affected, clinging woman, and led her down the steps. Her arm kept saying to him: "I am in your charge. Nobody but you could have persuaded me into this adventure...." Docks full of criminals of the deepest dye. The genuine jury-box from the original Old Bailey. Recumbent figures in frightful opium dens. Reconstitutions of illustrious murder scenes, with glasses of champagne and packs of cards on the tables, and siren women on chairs. Wonderful past all wondering! Violet was enthralled. Quickly she grew calmer, but she never relaxed her hold on him. The souvenirs of incredible crimes somehow sharpened the edge of his feeling for her and inflamed the romance. He remembered with delicious pain how his longing for this unparalleled Violet had made him unhappy night and day for weeks, how it had seemed impossible that she could ever be his, this incarnation of the very spirit of vivacity, brightness, energy, dominance. ... And now he dominated her. She attached herself to him, wound round him, the ivy to his oak. She was not young. And thank God she was not young. A nice spectacle he would have made, gallivanting round at the short skirts of some girlish thing! She was ideal, and she was his. The exquisite thought ran to and fro in his head all the time.
"What murder can that be?" she demanded in front of a kitchen interior. She had identified the others.
Close by was a lady with a catalogue.
"Would you mind telling me what crime this is supposed to be, madam?" Henry politely asked, raising his hat. The lady looked at him with a malignant expression.
"Can't you buy a catalogue for yourself?"
"Vulgar, nasty creature!" muttered Violet.
Henry said nothing, made no sign. They walked away. He knew that he ought to have bought a catalogue at the start, but he had not bought one, and now he could not. No! He could not. The situation was dreadful, but Violet enchantingly eased it.
"Everything ought to be labelled," she said. "However——" And she began to talk cheerfully as if nothing had happened.
They passed along a corridor and through a turnstile, and were once again in the less sensational Hall of Tableaux, and they heard the tinkling, unbridled laughter of girls surveying themselves in the distorting mirrors. Henry limped noticeably. Violet led the way through the restaurant towards the main hall. Tea laid on spotless tables. Jam in saucers on the tables. Natty, pretty and smiling waitresses.