[Alice counts: you can see her lips move. Uncle Edward hums his counting as an accompaniment to the little song.
And so we have got to the Eighteenth Century. And we're to have a comedy of manners, and a nice study of clothes. All rather shapely; for it contains a real Beau, and the only valet who was ever a hero, and the only hero who ever had Mercury to valet him.
There is a good deal of dressing up in this scene, and a neat ploy of dressing down, and a man's soul comes into being all over an affair of a looking-glass. Which makes a pretty piece of work.
Alice knows Hogarth through the--shall we say?--nicer prints, and Austin Dobson through the daintiest of Ballads. This scene is a sort of mixture to her of early reading, and visits with her Uncle to the National Gallery, and old bits of China, and dumpy little leather-bound volumes of "The Spectator", the real "Spectator", which she can just remember on the fourth shelf from the top near the window.
You may add, for your own personal satisfaction, when you are sitting and looking on, all that tense excitement the very words "Eighteenth Century" awaken in the properly balanced mind. Wigs and coaches and polite highwaymen, and lonely gibbets on still more lonely moors, and the Bath road with its chains and posts, all come into the background. Pedlars and cries of Pottles of Cherries, Puppet Showmen, and Clowns on stilts and French watergilders, and the sound of swords early in the morning in Leicester Fields: the touch of them all should be there. And also St. James's Street crammed with sedan chairs, and black pages with parrots, and the rattle of dice at White's or Almack's, and the hurrying feet of the Duke of Queensberry's running footmen. Such romantic dreams should come to you. Sliding panels and gentlemen driving heiresses to Gretna Green, and secret meeting places, and Fleet marriages and the scent of lavender, musk, and bergamot!
But the song is nearly over and the curtains are drawn back.
The room might be a background to a picture by Zoffany, dim and mellow and empty. There is a door leading to the passage; another that must lead to the Beau's bedroom. There is a fireplace with a fire burning. A portrait of the Woman of the World is over the fireplace. There is a dressing-table by the fireplace, with a tall wig stand and a big arm-chair by it. There is a bureau with writing materials. There are cupboards in the wall full of clothes and stockings and shoes. The bedroom door is open.
Harlequin-Valet stands listening until the sound of the song dies away. He has a clothes' brush in his hand. Then he places the clothes he has been brushing on the Beau's chair in a ridiculous semblance of a man. He adds a wig to the wig stand which is behind it, puts a patch on the wig block; a cane to one sleeve, a snuff-box to the other; puts shoes to their place, so that the stockings dangle into them, and then stands back to admire his work. He bows low.
Columbine dances on with a feather brush in her hand. He takes her to the clothes, and presents her to them with every formality. She curtseys.