Alice quite saw what she meant.
“Size,” said Mrs. Stubbs. “Give me size. That was what my poor dear husband was always saying. He couldn’t stand anything small. Gave him the creeps. And, strange as it may seem, my dear”—here Mrs. Stubbs creaked and seemed to expand herself at the memory—“it was dropsy that carried him off at the larst. Many’s the time they drawn one and a half pints from ’im at the ’ospital... It seemed like a judgmint.”
Alice burned to know exactly what it was that was drawn from him. She ventured, “I suppose it was water.”
But Mrs. Stubbs fixed Alice with her eyes and replied meaningly, “It was liquid, my dear.”
Liquid! Alice jumped away from the word like a cat and came back to it, nosing and wary.
“That’s ’im!” said Mrs. Stubbs, and she pointed dramatically to the life-size head and shoulders of a burly man with a dead white rose in the buttonhole of his coat that made you think of a curl of cold mutting fat. Just below, in silver letters on a red cardboard ground, were the words, “Be not afraid, it is I.”
“It’s ever such a fine face,” said Alice faintly.
The pale-blue bow on the top of Mrs. Stubbs’s fair frizzy hair quivered. She arched her plump neck. What a neck she had! It was bright pink where it began and then it changed to warm apricot, and that faded to the colour of a brown egg and then to a deep creamy.
“All the same, my dear,” she said surprisingly, “freedom’s best!” Her soft, fat chuckle sounded like a purr. “Freedom’s best,” said Mrs. Stubbs again.
Freedom! Alice gave a loud, silly little titter. She felt awkward. Her mind flew back to her own kitching. Ever so queer! She wanted to be back in it again.