“Oh but,” said Kate, “I don’t want to be perched right up there, so far away.”
“Why no!” said Owen. “We’re much better where we are, in our ‘Sun,’ which isn’t going to shine a great deal after all.”
The sky was cloudy, preparing for the rainy season.
It was nearly three o’clock in the afternoon, and the crowd was filling in, but still only occupied patches of the bare concrete. The lower tiers were reserved, so the bulk of the people sat in the midway levels, and gentry like our trio were more or less isolated.
But the audience was already a mob, mostly of fattish town men in black tight suits and little straw hats, and a mixing-in of the dark-faced labourers in big hats. The men in black suits were probably employees and clerks and factory hands. Some had brought their women, in sky-blue chiffon with brown chiffon hats and faces powdered to look like white marshmallows. Some were families with two or three children.
The fun began. The game was to snatch the hard straw hat off some fellow’s head, and send it skimming away down the slope of humanity, where some smart bounder down below would catch it and send it skimming across in another direction. There were shouts of jeering pleasure from the mass, which rose almost to a yell as seven straw hats were skimming, meteor-like, at one moment across the slope of people.
“Look at that!” said Owen. “Isn’t that fun!”
“No,” said Kate, her little alter ego speaking out for once, in spite of her will-to-happiness. “No, I don’t like it. I really hate common people.”
As a socialist, Owen disapproved, and as a happy man, he was disconcerted. Because his own real self, as far as he had any left, hated common rowdiness just as much as Kate did.
“It’s awfully smart though!” he said, trying to laugh in sympathy with the mob. “There now, see that!”