Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley
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Taxying through Wardour Street with Di, I had often noticed an antique shop appropriately crusted with the grime of centuries, all but the polished window, where lace and china and bits of old silver were displayed. It seemed to me that a person intelligent enough to combine odds and ends with such fetching effect ought to be the man to appreciate my great--or great great-grandmother's scarf. I didn't run to taxis when alone, and would as soon have got into one of those appalling motor buses as leap on to the back of a mad elephant that had berserkered out of the Zoo. Consequently, I had to walk. It was an untidy, badly dusted day, with a hot wind; and I realized, when I caught sight of myself in a convex mirror in the curiosity-shop window, that I looked rather like a small female edition of Strumpelpeter. There was a bell on the door which, like a shrill, disparaging leit motif, announced me, and made me suddenly self-conscious. It hadn't occurred to me before that there was anything to be ashamed of or frightened about in my errand. I'd vaguely pictured the shopman as a dear old Dickensy thing who would take a fussy interest in me and my scarf, and who would, with a fatherly manner, press upon me a handful of sovereigns or a banknote. But as the bell jangled, one of the most repulsive men I ever saw looked toward the door. There was another man in the place, talking to the first creature, and he looked up, too. Not even the blindest bat, however, could have mistaken him for a shopkeeper, and his being there put not only a different complexion on the business, but on me. I felt mine turning bright pink, instead of the usual cream that accompanies the chocolate-coloured hair and eyes with which I advertise the industry of my French ancestors. The shopman stared at me with a sulky look exactly like that of Nebuchadnezzar, our boar pig from Yorkshire, which took a prize for its nose or something. This person might have won a prize for his nose also, if an offer had been going for large ones. The rest of his face, olive green and fat, was in the perspective of this nose, just as the lesser proportions of his body, such as chest and legs, were in the perspective of his--waist. The shop was much smaller than I had expected from the window--a place you might have swung a cat in without giving it concussion of the brain, but not a lion; and the men--the fat proprietor and his long, lean customer, and two suits of deformed-looking armour, seemed almost to fill it. I've heard an actor talk about a theatre being so tiny he was "on the audience"; and these two were on theirs, the audience being me. I was so close to the fat one that I could see the crumbs on the folds of his waistcoat, like food stored on cupboard shelves. I took such a dislike to him that I felt inclined to bounce out as quickly as I had bounced in, but the door had banged mechanically
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