That evening Sylvia had made up her mind to return to England at once, but after she had gone to bed she was awakened by Mrs. Gainsborough’s coming into her room and in a choked voice asking for help. When the light was turned on, Sylvia saw that she was enmeshed in a mosquito-net and looking in her nightgown like a large turbot.
“I knew it would happen,” Mrs. Gainsborough panted. “Every night I’ve said to myself, ‘It’s bound to happen,’ and it has. I was dreaming how that Shoushou was chasing me with a butterfly-net, and look at me! Don’t tell me dreams don’t sometimes come true. Now don’t stand there in fits of laughter. I can’t get out of it, you unfeeling thing. I’ve swallowed about a pint of Keating’s. I hope I sha’n’t come out in spots. Come and help me out. I daren’t move a finger, or I shall start off sneezing again. And every time I sneeze I get deeper in. It’s something chronic.”
“Didn’t Linthicum ever inform you how to get out of a mosquito-net that collapses in the middle of the night?” Sylvia asked, when she had extricated the old lady.
“No, the conversation never happened to take a turn that way. But depend upon it, I shall ask him to-morrow. I won’t be caught twice.”
Sylvia suddenly felt that it would be impossible to return to England yet.
“We must go on,” she told Mrs. Gainsborough. “You must have more opportunities for practising what Linthicum has been preaching to you.”
“What you’d like is for me to make a poppy-show of myself all over the world and drag me round the Continent like a performing bear.”
“We’ll go to Morocco,” Sylvia cried.
“Don’t shout like that. You’ll set me off on the sneeze again. You’re here, there, and everywhere like a demon king, I do declare. Morocco? That’s where the leather comes from, isn’t it? Do they have mosquito-nets there too?”
Sylvia nodded.