“I got it,” said the hall-porter with inimitable profundity.
And then, having let me realise the fulness of that, he said: “They never used it!”
“No?”
“No! He carried her down in his arms.”
“And out?”
He was difficult to follow in his description of the Sea Lady. She wore her wrap, it seems, and she was “like a statue”—whatever he may have meant by that. Certainly not that she was impassive. “Only,” said the porter, “she was alive. One arm was bare, I know, and her hair was down, a tossing mass of gold.
“He looked, you know, like a man who’s screwed himself up.
“She had one hand holding his hair—yes, holding his hair, with her fingers in among it.…
“And when she see my face she threw her head back laughing at me.