She seemed to brush aside the winds who came a-courting,
although wide strokes of swimming really described her movements best.
A little farther back, in the middle distance, he recognised by his
peaked cap the gendarme, Gygi, as he paused in his digging and looked
up to watch the fun; and beyond him again, solid in figure as she was
unchanging in her affections, he saw Mrs. Postmaster, struggling with
a bed sheet the _pensionnaires des Glycines_ helped her shake in the
evening breeze. It was too close upon the hour of _souper_ for her to
travel farther from the kitchen. And beside her stood Miss Waghorn,
waving an umbrella. She was hatless. Her tall, thin figure, dressed in
black, against the washing hung out to dry, looked like a note of
exclamation, or, when she held the umbrella up at right angles, like a
capital L the fairies had set in the ground upon its head.
And the fairies themselves, the sprites, the children! They were
everywhere and anywhere. Jimbo flickered, went out, reappeared, then
flickered again; he held a towel in one hand and a table napkin in the
other. Monkey seemed more in the air than on the solid earth, for one
minute she was obviously a ball, and the next, with a motion like a
somersault, her hair shot loose across the sunlight as though she
flew.
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