Harlequin.. Let us ask her when she has picked up the pieces.
[And here Alice and Uncle Edward draw the curtains, for the scene is over. But Alice still stands fingering their folds. Her eyes smile, but her mouth droops a little doubtfully. She is never over-happy about this scene. "Very pretty" she hears the front row people say; and then they rustle their programmes and read about whiskey very old in bottle, or cigarettes, a very special blend. "Very pretty" is so patronising. Someone else remarks "How quaint"; and that is worse still. Miles away from us is the meaning of that eighteenth century with its polished perfections. So perfect, yet so partially perfect, that mankind could only break them all to pieces and start again. But Alice, tidy little soul, loves the fine order of it all. If they embroidered flowers so well, they must, she thinks, have loved the very flowers, too, and such good manners must have meant that somewhere underneath the silk and stays they had kind and worthy souls. But her mouth does droop a little, and she asks her uncle, almost whispering:
"Do you think they understood it?"
"Any child could understand it," Uncle Edward says, and back to his paper he goes.
Alice gives a shy glance round. She doesn't mind now if they do hear.
"But that's the trouble, as poor Auntie used to say: 'They're not children.' Don't we only wish they were."
Once more, then, Uncle Edward sizes up the house; a good house now, a contented house, a bread-and-butter house not to be quarrelled with.
"You take your public as you find 'em, my Missie," he says, or rather, this he only seems to say. His words are: "Alice, get on with your bit."
So Alice smiles again, and smooths her frock and puts her heels together and turns out her toes, and gets on.