“Get along with you,” the landlady chuckled. “Now don’t go to sleep, Lily. Your supper is just on ready.” She went puffing from the room in busy mirthfulness.
“She’s one of the best,” said Sylvia. “This house was given to her by an old General who died about two years ago. You can see the painting of him up in her bedroom as a dare-devil hussar with drooping whiskers. She was a gay contemporary of the Albert Memorial. You know. Argyle Rooms and Cremorne. With the Haymarket as the center of naughtiness.”
It was funny, Michael thought, that his tobacconist should have mentioned Cremorne only this afternoon. That he had done so affected him more sharply now with a sense of the appropriateness of this house in Tinderbox Lane. Appropriateness to what? Perhaps merely to the mood of this foggy night.
“Supper! Supper!” Mrs. Gainsborough was crying.
It was dismaying for Michael to think that he had not kissed Lily yet, and he wished that Sylvia would hurry ahead into the other room and give him an opportunity. He wanted to pull her gently from that chair, up from that chair into his arms. But Sylvia was the one who did so, and she kissed Lily half fiercely, leaving Michael disconsolately to follow them across the passage.
It was jolly to see Mrs. Gainsborough sitting at the head of the table with the orange-shaded lamp throwing warm rays upon her countenance. That it was near the chilly hour of one, with a cold thick fog outside, was inconceivable when he looked at that cheery great porpoise of a woman unscrewing bottles of India Pale Ale.
Michael did not want the questions about him and Lily to begin again. So he turned the conversation upon a more remote past.
“Oh, my eye, my eye!” laughed Sylvia. “To think that Aunt Enormous was once in the ballet at the Opera.”
“How dare you laugh at me? Whoof!” Mrs. Gainsborough gave a sort of muffled bark as her arm pounced out to grab Sylvia. The two of them frisked with each other absurdly, while Lily sat with wide-open blue eyes, so graceful even in that stiff chair close up to the table, that Michael was in an ecstasy of admiration, and marveled gratefully at the New Year’s Day which could so change his fortune.
“Were you in the ballet?” he asked.