'To Madame Tussaud's,' I said. 'You go by the Underground Railway from here. Get in at St. James's Park Station, and out at Baker Street Station—about twenty-five minutes in the cars. And you are not,' I said, remembering what I had been told, 'under any consideration whatever, to get in or out of the train while it is moving.'
Mr. Mafferton laughed. 'Lady Torquilin has been coaching you,' he said: but he still looked uncomfortable, and thinking he felt, perhaps, like an intruder upon my plans, and wishing to put him at his ease, I said: 'It would really be very kind of you to come, Mr. Mafferton, for even at school I never could remember English history, and now I've probably got your dynasties worse mixed up than ever. It would be a great advantage to go with somebody who knows all the dates, and which kings usurped their thrones, and who they properly belonged to.'
Mr. Mafferton laughed again. 'I hope you don't expect all that of me,' he said. 'But if you are quite sure we couldn't rout Lady Torquilin out, I will take you to Madame Tussaud's with the greatest pleasure, Miss Wick.'
'I'm quite sure,' I told Mr. Mafferton, cheerfully. 'She said all those wax people, with their idiotic expressions, this afternoon would simply finish her up!'—and Mr. Mafferton said Lady Torquilin put things very quaintly, didn't she? And we went together into one of those great echoing caverns in the sides of the streets that led down flights of dirty steps, past the man who punches the tickets, and widen out into that border of desolation with a fierce star burning and brightening in the blackness of the farther end, which is a platform of the Underground Railway.
'This,' said I to Mr. Mafferton as we walked up and down waiting for our train, 'is one of the things I particularly wanted to see.'
'The penny weighing-machine?' asked Mr. Mafferton, for I had stopped to look at that.
'The whole thing,' said I—'the Underground system. But this is interesting in itself,' I added, putting a penny in, and stepping on the machine.
