I confessed I should, and she jumped in beside me, saying, “Sit still, then, child!” and moved the crissy-cross starfish thing in front, and we were off.
Mercy, what a rate! Policemen seemed to hold up their hands in amazement at us, and she looked pleased and flattered. We drove on and on, past the Hounslow turning, through miles of nursery gardens and then miles of slums, till at last the houses got smarter and bigger, and I guessed this was the part of London where George lives, only I did not ask questions. I hardly ever do. I did see a clock once, and I saw it was nearly our lunch time. I realized that I had missed rice-pudding for once, and was glad. She talked all the way along, and I listened. I find that is what people like, for she kept telling me that I was a nice child, and that she thought she should run away with me.
“You are running away with me,” I said.
“And you don’t care a bit, you very imperturbable atom! I think I shall take you home with me to luncheon. You amuse me.”
She amused me. She was a darling—so gay, so light, as if she didn’t care about anything, and had never had a stomach-ache in her whole life. If George’s high-up friends are like this, I don’t wonder he prefers them to Aunt Gerty. Mother can be as amusing as anybody,—I am not going to try to take Mother down—but even she can’t pretend she is happy as this woman seemed to be. She was like champagne,—the very dry kind George opens a bottle of when he is down, and gives Mother and me a whole glassful between us.
We were quite in a town now, and on a soft pavement made of wood, like my bedroom floor. The streets, oddly enough, grew grander and narrower. She told me about the houses as we went along.
“That is where my uncle, the Duke of Frocester, lives,” she said, and pointed to a kind of grey tomb, with a paved courtyard in a very tiny street. I knew that name—the name of the man George stays and shoots with—but of course I didn’t say anything. Then we passed a funny little house in a smaller street called after a chapel, and there was a fanlight over the door, and a great extinguisher thing on the railings.
“You have no idea what a lovely place that is inside,” she told me. “A great friend of mine lives there, and pulled it about. He took out all the inside of the house, and made false walls to the rooms. One of them has just the naked bricks and mortar showing, but then the mortar is all gilt. He always has quantities of flowers, great arum lilies shining in the gloom, and oleanders in pots, and stunted Japanese trees. He gives heavenly tea-parties and little suppers after the play. He writes plays, but somehow they have never been acted that I know of? Bachelors always do you so well. I declare, if I wasn’t going to see him this very afternoon at my club, I would go in and surprise him, now that I have got you with me, you little elf! You have certainly got the widest open eyes I ever saw. He is probably in there now, working at his little table in the window, getting up the notes for his lecture, so we should put him out abominably. I will take you to the lecture instead. And remind me to lend you one of his books,—that is, if your mother allows you to read novels.”
I explained to her that I was a little off novels, as my father kept us on them.
“Oh, does he? How interesting! I love authors! You must introduce him to me some day. Bring him to one of my literary teas. I always make a point of raising an author or so for the afternoon. It pleases my crowd so, far better than music and recitations, and played-out amusements of that kind; and then one doesn’t have to pay them. They are only too glad to come and get paid in kind looks that cost nothing. The queerer they are, the more people believe in them. I used to have Socialists, but really they were too dirty! Some authors now are quite smart, and wear their hair no longer than Lord Scilly, or so very little longer. Now, there is Morrell Aix, the man who wrote The Laundress. I took him up, but he had been obliged, he said, to live in the slums for two years to get up his facts, and you could have grown mustard and cress on the creases of his collar. And I do think, considering the advertisement he gave them, the laundresses might have taken more trouble with the poor man’s shirts!”