Manchurian Books

Occasionally they bumped about a bit
and one even heard them overhead, which gave them a greater effect of
reality without mitigating their vertical predominance. Sometimes too I
saw them. Of course if I came upon them in the park or in the shrubbery
(where I was a trespasser) I hid or fled in pious horror, but I was
upon due occasion taken into the Presence by request. I remember
her "leddyship" then as a thing of black silks and a golden chain,
a quavering injunction to me to be a good boy, a very shrunken
loose-skinned face and neck, and a ropy hand that trembled a halfcrown
into mine. Miss Somerville hovered behind, a paler thing of broken
lavender and white and black, with screwed up, sandy-lashed eyes.
Her hair was yellow and her colour bright, and when we sat in the
housekeeper's room of a winter's night warming our toes and sipping
elder wine, her maid would tell us the simple secrets of that belated
flush.... After my fight with young Garvell I was of course banished,
and I never saw those poor old painted goddesses again.


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