“Isn't that glorious?” Mrs. Mullet asked, as we stopped before his Venus—a tall lady standing on half a cockle-shell, neatly poised on breezy water.
“She has crooked feet,” said Betsey.
“Well, I guess yours would be crooked if you had been to sea on a cockle-shell,” I said, which will prove to the learned reader that we were about as ignorant of art as any in that hurrying crowd of misguided people.
“Oh, I think it's a wonderful thing! Look at the colors!” Mrs. Mullet exclaimed.
“But the toes are so long—they are rippling toes. Those on the right foot look as if they had just finished a difficult run on the piano,” Betsey insisted.
“She might be called the Long-toed Venus,” I suggested. “But she isn't to blame for that. I suppose she was born with that infirmity.”
So we crude and business-like Americans went on, as we flitted here and there, sipping the honey from each flower of art.
Twelve-thirty had arrived, and I suggested to Betsey that she should meet the young people and go with them wherever they pleased, and that they could find me at the hotel at four. She left us, and I asked Mrs. Mullet what I could do for her.
“I'm in perfectly awful trouble,” she sighed, with rising tears.
“Tell me all about it,” I said. “But please do not weep, or people will wonder what this cruel old man has been doing to you.”