Stepping out of the train in the wake of Tom, Dorothy was at once caught in the crowd on Paddington arrival platform. She was pushed and squeezed and buffeted, but her eyes were shining, and her face was all smiles, for she felt that she was seeing life at last.
“Whew! Some crowd, isn’t it?” panted Tom, as a fat man laden with a great bundle of rugs and golf clubs barged into him from behind, while a lady carrying a yelling infant charged at him from the side, and catching him unawares, sent him lurching against Dorothy.
She was sturdy, and stood up to the impact without disaster, only saying in a breathless fashion, “Oh, Tom, what a lot of people! Where do you expect they all come from?”
“Can’t say. You had better ask ’em,” Tom chuckled, as he sprang for the nearest taxi, and secured it too, although a ferocious looking man, with brown whiskers like a doormat, was calling out that he wanted that particular vehicle.
Dorothy meanwhile secured a porter, and extricating Tom’s luggage and her own from the pile on the platform, the things were bundled into the taxi; she and Tom tumbled in after them, and they were moving away from the platform before the angry person with doormat whiskers had done making remarks about them.
“That is what I call a good get-away,” Tom sighed with satisfaction, lolling at ease in his corner. “You will have time to buy your finery now, without any danger of our missing the train.”
“Bless you, I should have taken the time in any case, whether we lost the train or not,” rejoined Dorothy calmly. Then she asked, with a twinkle in her eye, “Are you coming to help me choose the frock?”
“Not me; what should I be likely to know about a girl’s duds?” and Tom looked as superior as he felt.
Dorothy leant back laughing. “Sometimes you talk as if you know a lot,” she said mischievously. “Do you remember Brenda Gomme and the marigold satin?”
Tom grinned, but stuck to it that he had not been so far wrong in calling the thing marigold, seeing that it was yellow, and marigolds were yellow.