His words are: "Alice, get on with your
bit."
So Alice smiles again, and smooths her frock and puts her heels
together and turns out her toes, and gets on.
* * * * *
ALICE. [As she faces them.] I beg your pardon. Well, that was in seventeen
hundred and something. And we skip the eighteen hundreds because they were
so busy: too busy to play, except just riotously, and we skip to-day, too,
because ... well, really because what we showed you about to-day with bits
of "you" put in it might seem rather rude. And we skip to-morrow, because
to-morrow really is too serious to make our sort of jokes about. So we go
right on to the day after. And you've noticed, haven't you, that we go
westward all the time? So next the scene's in America, which you get to
through New York. Things have been going from bad to worse with our four
poor gods, but what has principally knocked them endways is machinery. Now
America is full of machinery. And they can't understand it. For whatever
a machine is supposed to do in the end, there's one thing it always seems
sure to do in the beginning, if you're not very, very careful.
Pages:
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77