"This is John Thomas marryin' Lady Jane," he said. "An' we mun let Constance an' Oliver go their ways. Maybe—"
He spread out his hand with a gesture, and then he sneezed, sneezing away the flowers from his nose and his navel. He sneezed again.
"Maybe what?" she said, waiting for him to go on.
He looked at her a little bewildered.
"Eh?" he said.
"Maybe what? Go on with what you were going to say," she insisted.
"Ay, what was I going to say?"
He had forgotten. And it was one of the disappointments of her life, that he never finished.
A yellow ray of sun shone over the trees.
"Sun!" he said. "And time you went. Time, my lady, time! What's that as flies without wings, your ladyship? Time! Time!"
He reached for his shirt.
"Say good night! to John Thomas," he said, looking down at his penis. "He's safe in the arms of creeping-jenny! Not much burning pestle about him just now."
And he put his flannel shirt over his head.
"A man's most dangerous moment," he said, when his head had emerged, "is when he's getting into his shirt. Then he puts his head in a bag. That's why I prefer those American shirts, that you put on like a jacket." She still stood watching him. He stepped into his short drawers, and buttoned them round the waist.
"Look at Jane!" he said. "In all her blossoms! Who'll put blossoms on you next year, Jinny? Me, or somebody else? 'Good bye my bluebell, farewell to you!' I hate that song, it's early war days." He had sat down, and was pulling on his stockings. She still stood unmoving. He laid his hand on the slope of her buttocks. "Pretty little Lady Jane!" he said. "Perhaps in Venice you'll find a man who'll put jasmine in your maiden-hair, and a pomegranate flower in your navel. Poor little Lady Jane!"
"Don't say those things!" she said. "You only say them to hurt me."
He dropped his head. Then he said, in dialect:
"Ay, maybe I do, maybe I do! Well then, I'll say nowt, an' ha' done wi't. But the mun dress thysen, an' go back to thy stately
