‘Look! there are the Blakes coming out,’ cries Betty suddenly; she is standing on tiptoe at the window, which commands a fine view of the entrance to the photographer’s. ‘Auntie, Susan, let us go, before any other people come.’
With this they all in a body cross the road, Carew having caught up Bonnie, who is all eagerness to see this wonderful thing that will put Susan’s face on paper.
Upstairs they march in a body, to find themselves presently in a most evil-smelling corridor, out of which the studio opens. Here they wait perforce, until at last the studio door opens, and some people of the farming class, and very flurried and flushed, walk nervously down the little lane between them.
‘Now is your time!’ says Betty, who is really quite irrepressible to-day. She takes the lead, and they all swarm after her into the studio, to find there an emaciated man in highly respectable clothes regarding them with a melancholy eye. Collodion seems to have saturated him.
‘Aunt Jemima, you first,’ says Susan.
‘Yes, certainly,’ says Dom. ‘First come, first served. And, you know, in spite of Betty’s well-meant endeavours, you entered the room first.’
‘Besides which it is the part of the young to give way to their elders,’ says Miss Barry, striving to keep up her dignity, whilst dying with terror. The photographer and the great big thing over there with dingy velvet cloth over it have subdued her almost out of recognition.
‘Now, auntie, come on. He’s looking at you.’ ‘He’ is the photographer, who has now, indeed, turned a lack-lustre eye on Miss Barry.
‘We are rather pressed for time,’ says he in a lugubrious tone. ‘Which lady wishes to be taken first?’
‘Answer him, auntie,’ says Susan.