Kate sat gingerly between her two iron loops, and looked vaguely around.
“I think it’s thrilling!” she said.
Like most modern people, she had a will-to-happiness.
“Isn’t it thrilling,” cried Owen, whose will-to-happiness was almost a mania. “Don’t you think so, Bud?”
“Why, yes, I think it may be,” said Villiers, non-committal.
But then Villiers was young, he was only over twenty, while Owen was over forty. The younger generation calculates its “happiness” in a more business-like fashion. Villiers was out after a thrill, but he wasn’t going to say he’d got one till he’d got it. Kate and Owen—Kate was also nearly forty—must enthuse a thrill, out of a sort of politeness to the great Show-man, Providence.
“Look here!” said Owen. “Supposing we try to protect our extremity on this concrete—” and thoughtfully he folded his rain-coat and laid it along the concrete ledge so that both he and Kate could sit on it.
They sat and gazed around. They were early. Patches of people mottled the concrete slope opposite, like eruptions. The ring just below was vacant, neatly sanded; and above the ring, on the encircling concrete, great advertisements for hats, with a picture of a city-man’s straw hat, and advertisements for spectacles, with pairs of spectacles supinely folded, glared and shouted.
“Where is the ‘Shade’ then?” said Owen, twisting his neck.
At the top of the amphitheatre, near the sky, were concrete boxes. This was the “Shade,” where anybody who was anything sat.