“What ’ud I be staring up at the top story of a house for, you saucy little image, if I’d have lost anything—unless I’d dropped my umbrella out of a balloon, and which I haven’t?... Hi!”
On hearing the cerise bonnet begin to shout again, the small boy put the mouth-organ in his pocket and looking up in the air shouted “Hi!” too. Two little girls dragging behind them a child of doubtful sex smeared with barley sugar stopped to gaze, and then three more small boys arrived on the scene and proceeded to augment the duet of “Hi!”
A policeman, who had been lured from Dean Street into Blackboy Passage by the noise, inquired of the cerise bonnet what its need was.
“Can’t you get into your house, mum?”
“No, I can’t. I want to visit a lady friend of mine who lives at 5 Blackboy Passage, and when I rung the bell a female like a potted shrimp poked her head out of a top-floor window and asked me if I wanted Mr. and Mrs. Blanchit.”
“Mr. Blanchit lives at number five,” one of the small boys volunteered. “Down in the basement, he lives.”
“Well, what’s that got to do with you, you pushing little eel? I don’t want the man. I want to see my lady friend.”
“Perhaps you’ve got the wrong number,” the policeman suggested.
“Wrong number be ... well, I won’t say what I was thinking, because it doesn’t always do.”
It was at this moment that Letizia, who had been trying vainly for an hour after dinner to make her mother play with the gilded antelopes, decided to look out of the window.