THREE:CHAPTER I."Little girl?"
THREE:"There was another fortune-teller who did his work by writing on a plate. He had several sheets of paper folded up, and from these he asked his customer to select one. When the selection was made, he dissected the writing, and showed its meaning to be something so profound that the customer was bewildered and thought he had nothing but good-fortune coming to him. We tried to get these men to tell our fortunes, but they preferred to stick to their own countrymen, probably through fear that they would lose popularity if they showed themselves too friendly with the strangers.When they were passing the famous place, they looked out and saw the houses and trees far below them. Fred said they seemed to be riding in the air, and he thought he could understand how people must feel in a balloon.
THREE:It was that which his wife had expressed in her manner and her words: it was that for which he had chosen to swear at her. He had given her a good knock for hinting at it, and had followed up that knock by the stupid sort of joke about the superiority of her charms to those of Alice, which she was sure to appreciate. She had done so; she had said, For shame! and gone simpering to bed. Perhaps that would take her mind off the other affair. He sincerely hoped it would, but he distrusted her stupidity. A cleverer woman would have probably accepted the more superficial truth that there had never passed between him and Norah a single intimate word, but a stupid one might easily let a dull unfounded suspicion take root in her mind. It was difficult to deal with stupid people: you never knew where their stupidity might break out next. Emmeline had a certain power of sticking, and Mrs Fyson had a brilliant imagination. Together they might evolve some odious by-product, one that would fumble and shove its way into the underlying truth.{152}"Those will do," Fred answered, "and here is Longfellow's famous poem 'Excelsior,' which every schoolboy knows, or ought to know. It was done into pidgin English by somebody who lived in the country and evidently knew what he was about:
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