This
enclosure was already crowded with some three hundred people, sitting
and standing. Edward Henry had stood in the only unoccupied spot he
could find, behind a pillar. When he had made himself as comfortable
as possible by turning up his collar against the sharp winds that
continually entered from the street, he had peered forward, and seen
in front of his enclosure another and larger enclosure also crowded
with people, but more expensive people. After a blank interval of
thirty minutes a band had begun to play at an incredible distance in
front of him, extinguishing the noises of traffic in the street. After
another interval an oblong space rather further off even than the band
suddenly grew bright, and Edward Henry, by curving his neck first
to one side of the pillar and then to the other, had had tantalizing
glimpses of the interior of a doll's drawing-room and of male and
female dolls therein.
He could only see, even partially, the inferior half of the
drawing-room--a little higher than the heads of the dolls--because the
rest was cut off from his vision by the lowness of his own ceiling.
The dolls were talking, but he could not catch clearly what they said,
save at the rare moments when an omnibus or a van did not happen to be
thundering down the street behind him. Then one special doll had come
exquisitely into the drawing-room, and at the sight of her the five
hundred people in front of him, and numbers of other people perched
hidden beyond his ceiling, had clapped fervently and even cried aloud
in their excitement.
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