POLICEMAN. What is it?
CINDERELLA (softly as if it were a line from the Bible). Their exquisite smallness and perfect shape.
POLICEMAN (with a friendly glance at the Venus). For my part I’m partial to big women with their noses in the air.
CINDERELLA (stung). So is everybody (pathetically). I’ve tried. But it’s none so easy, with never no butcher’s meat in the house. You’ll see where the su-perb shoulders and the haughty manners come from if you look in shop windows and see the whole of a cow turned inside out and ‘Delicious’ printed on it.
POLICEMAN (always just). There’s something in that.
CINDERELLA (swelling). But it doesn’t matter how fine the rest of you is if you doesn’t have small feet.
POLICEMAN. I never gave feet a thought.
CINDERELLA. The swells think of nothing else. (Exploding.) Wait till you are at the Ball. Many a haughty beauty with superb uppers will come sailing in—as sure of the prize as if ‘Delicious’ was pinned on her—and then forward steps the Lord Mayor, and, utterly disregarding her uppers, he points to the bottom of her skirt, and he says ‘Lift!’ and she has to lift, and there’s a dead silence, and nothing to be heard except the Prince crying ‘Throw her out!’
POLICEMAN (somewhat staggered by her knowledge of the high life). What’s all this about a ball?
(CINDERELLA sees she has said too much and her mouth shuts.)