Page:The plumed serpent - 1926.djvu/13

 “Why, yes, I think it may be,” said Villiers, non-committal.

But then Villiers was young, he was only over twenty, while Owen was over forty. The younger generation calculates its “happiness” in a more business-like fashion. Villiers was out after a thrill, but he wasn’t going to say he’d got one till he’d got it. Kate and Owen—Kate was also nearly forty—must enthuse a thrill, out of a sort of politeness to the great Show-man, Providence.

“Look here!” said Owen. “Supposing we try to protect our extremity on this concrete—” and thoughtfully he folded his rain-coat and laid it along the concrete ledge so that both he and Kate could sit on it.

They sat and gazed around. They were early. Patches of people mottled the concrete slope opposite, like eruptions. The ring just below was vacant, neatly sanded; and above the ring, on the encircling concrete, great advertisements for hats, with a picture of a city-man’s straw hat, and advertisements for spectacles, with pairs of spectacles supinely folded, glared and shouted.

“Where is the ‘Shade’ then?” said Owen, twisting his neck.

At the top of the amphitheatre, near the sky, were concrete boxes. This was the “Shade,” where anybody who was anything sat.

“Oh but,” said Kate, “I don’t want to be perched right up there, so far away.”

“Why no!”[missing] [sic] said Owen. “We’re much better where we are, in our ‘Sun,’ which isn’t going to shine a great deal after all.”

The sky was cloudy, preparing for the rainy season.

It was nearly three o’clock in the afternoon, and the crowd was filling in, but still only occupied patches of the bare concrete. The lower tiers were reserved, so the bulk of the people sat in the mid-way levels, and gentry like our trio were more or less isolated.

But the audience was already a mob, mostly of fattish town men in black tight suits and little straw hats, and a mixing-in of the dark-faced labourers in big hats. The men in black suits were probably employees and clerks and factory hands. Some had brought their women, in sky-blue chiffon with brown chiffon hats and faces powdered to look