Mabel felt that there was no shame in retreating to the lamp-post at
the street corner, but, once there, she made herself halt and no one
but Mabel will ever know how much making that took. Think of it
to stand there, firm and quiet, and wait for those hollow,
unbelievable things to come up to her, clattering on the pavement
with their stumpy feet or borne along noiselessly, as in the case of
the flower-hatted lady, by a skirt that touched the ground, and had,
Mabel knew very well, nothing at all inside it.
She stood very still; the insides of her hands grew cold and damp,
but still she stood, saying over and over again: "They re not true
they can't be true. It's only a dream they aren't really true. They
can't be." And then Gerald was there, and all the Ugly-Wuglies
crowding round, and Gerald saying: "This is one of our friends
Mabel the Princess in the play, you know. Be a man!" he added in
a whisper for her ear alone.
Mabel, all her nerves stretched tight as banjo strings, had an awful
instant of not knowing whether she would be able to be a man or
whether she would be merely a shrieking and running little mad
girl. For the respectable Ugly-Wugly shook her limply by the hand.
("He can't be true," she told herself), and the rose-wreathed one
took her arm with a soft-padded glove at the end of an umbrella
arm, and said: "You dear, clever little thing! Do walk with me!" in
a gushing, girlish way, and in speech almost wholly lacking in
consonants.
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