“Oh, yes, quite so,” I said to the dirty man in the white (it had once been) jacket, and got hold of Mr. Aix, who was mooning about in evening dress, quite unsuitable for a journey. But he was always an untidy sort of inappropriate man.
“Where’s my mother?”
“Oh, your mother! Yes, she’s gone to her room. I’ll take you to her.”
“But are you going to make us live here?” I asked; but bless the man! he was too nervous to take any more notice of me and my remarks. We muddled along; I tumbled over a lump in the middle of the floor with grass sown on it, and caught my foot in a carpet, made of the same. Mr. Aix quite forgot me and I lost him.
“Mind! Mind!” everybody kept saying, and shouldering past me with bits of the very walls in their arms. They left the brick perfectly bare, as bare as our old coal-cellar at Isleworth. (The one in Cinque Cento House is panelled.) I saw an ordinary tree, as I thought, but I was quite upset to find it was flat, like a free-hand drawing. My eyes were dazzled with electric lights, mounted on strings, like a necklace, only stiff, that they pushed about everywhere they liked. There were things like our nursery fire-guard all round the gas, that was there as well as electric. I noticed a girl go and look through a hole in a bit of canvas or tapestry that took up all one side of the wall, and went near her.
“Pretty fair house!” she said. She was a funny-looking little thing, with hardly enough on, and what there was was dirty, or dyed a dirty colour. In fact no two persons there were dressed alike; it was like a fancy-dress party, such as the Hitchings have at their Christmas-tree. The noise was deafening, they were shoving heavy weights about here and there, without knowing particularly or caring where they were going. My new friend had an American accent, and was as gentle as a cat. She went a little way back from the curtain with me and stood by a man she seemed rather to like, though he didn’t seem to like her. He was very tall and big, and when she had been talking to him a little while, she said suddenly—
“Excuse me! I must not let myself get stiff!” and took hold of a great leather belt he wore, and propped herself up by it and began to dip up and down, opening her knees wide. The man didn’t seem to like it much, but he was kind and chaffed her, till I got tired of her see-sawing up and down, and talking of her Greekness, and asked one or the other of them to be kind enough to take me to my mother.
“Certainly, little ’un,” said the man; “kindly point the young lady out to me. There’s so many in the Greek chorus!”
“It is Miss Lucy Jennings’ daughter,” said somebody near.
“I’ll take you to her after my dance,” said the girl. “Wait. Watch me! I go on!”