“All right. Let me see. That will be when they have had time to think it over. That will be the Cold Dawn of the following morning. We will now make the Aurora.”
So we found a disengaged lady marionette and began to dress her in a piece of cobwebby grey muslin from which the last few spangles had not yet dropped. I said:
“I’m not at all sure that this is not going too far. Do you think we can really show the Cold Dawn of the following morning escaping out of Paris by the underground road?”
“She must go; she will be wanted at Montalbano to show some of the people that they have saved the wrong things.”
“Very true. Yes. That is what people so often do when they travel, they leave behind them the things they want most and take a lot of other things that are useless. Now, that resolution of the dominant seventh was hardly worth saving—at least it was not really new.”
“Where did you get it from?”
“I stole it out of the works of the musician whose bust was on your maestro’s piano the other day, the one with the Dutch name who lived in Vienna.”
“I hope you invented what the critic said?”
“Not exactly. Your poet reminded me of something in Walt Whitman and I twisted it round and gave it to the critic.”
“What’s Walt Whitman? Is he another Dutchman?”