“My friend is very weak. The young woman is only a sort of second-rate children’s nurse, apparently.”
“And do you want to go back there?”
“No, I prefer to be here. But it is so undignified not to be consulted.”
“That’s very true,” said the gardener, whose interest was beginning to wane.
“That road below is as crowded and as noisy as Piccadilly,” said Mrs. Rust. “Disgraceful.”
“Market day,” replied the novelist rapturously. “Such a blaze of colour. Such a babel of tongues....”
“And so smelly, I am sure,” said Mrs. Rust. “I am going to market.”
“Let’s all go to market,” added the gardener.
An hour had to be allowed for Courtesy to have her breakfast, and for Mrs. Rust to don her panama. Mrs. Rust, though not averse to startling any one of her own colour, had a secret distaste for the naïve criticisms of the niggers on her strange hair. The Islanders were not aware that dyed hair was the apex of modern fashion; they looked upon it, poor things, as a deformity, and a most amusing one. Mrs. Rust had been obliged to invest in a perfect beehive of a hat for wear in such ignorant parts.
So four more units joined the stream of marketers along the red road. In spite of Mrs. Rust’s panama, the niggers laughed. Niggers always laugh unless they cry, and the lunatic ways of white women provide a source of amusement that never fails, although white women have been on the Island for three hundred years. Some of the marketers actually had to remove their baskets of fruit—crowned with boots—from their heads, to give free play to their sense of humour. Every nigger wears his boots upon his head. It is, I suppose, as much a disgrace not to own them as it is a discomfort to wear them.