Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.
William Dement
[O]nce she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Alice was running through a tall and shady hedge maze, and though it was only twilight, pale droplets of fireflies flickered code to one another from the indigo shadows; she went laughing with a giddy openness the whole way. Shouldering the leaves and peering round corners, she had to gently bite her knuckles to keep from making too much sound, for he was very, very tricky, darting and shifting with the blotches of darkness, but she could hear him chuckling sometimes, and that was his flaw.
He meant no malice, certainly no harm, but there is something in being chased that creates its own self-fulfilling prophecy. The urgent mood, even in a game, amplifies in such an inevitable way—one runs and the other runs faster, end over end, until everybody falls down from exhaustion.
This time he played the minotaur, or perhaps Pan. This itself wasn't really peculiar, she just couldn't tell if the strange nubs poking up out of his glowing mop of hair were real horns or not; they certainly weren't box twigs he'd collected after crashing through false walls of shrubbery. He had horns, and he was chasing her through a hedge maze, and it was great fun: there are subtle truths even in dreams, but there is so little point in their notice.
Her flat slippers smacked slate now with a juicy echo as the path opened onto a narrow sunken garden. Alice did not stop to appreciate the snug little bench, nor did the graveled paths that spun backwards around whole roods of tiger lilies and violets catch her eye. She kept going, throwing one glance over her shoulder to see him slide with a loud shhhhkt to a stop at the edge of the stone tile, and just as she disappeared Alice thought he looked determined yet perplexed, which was a funny crossroad.
The maze returned at the opposite end of the garden, and she went around in a large circle where the edges of the hedges were square, twisting and turning, guaranteeing she'd lose him, he'd never find her like this. She turned, paused at a juncture, doubled-back, and when Alice had skipped past an alcove and turned up a long hallway, she saw something very odd at the end, where there was another wall and the path essentially became a large uppercase T, that thumped her up the middle so hard she went white cold: something flipped and slid around the shuddering leaves, unsnagging itself as it went.
There was someone else in the hedges.
It wasn't him; she had only seen it for a moment, a whipflash of color quite unlike what he'd been wearing. It had seemed a point of order, that there should be no one else, this scenario allowed for no others, and yet now it stood entirely factual: someone else was here. How curious, and just a touch ominous. Alice crunched along the path, carefully stolid in case whoever had just turned the corner was waiting to pounce and frighten her.
But there was no one, just another stretch of greenery, and capping it a wall of ivy. She could hear a pattering of feet, very far away or very close at hand, and she fled without thinking, aiming nearer the mossier cobblestones to not give herself away. The sky overhead seemed to be expanding, and Alice stepped close to the bushes, in the shade and hardly seeing through her own frantic glances, trying not to think about how the wall at her back was little more than sheared plant growth-easy to reach through with clawing fingers and fists.
She squinted, swallowed, and kept going, down a forking garden path, past the edge of a floating wall, through a curlicued dead end and back out, speeding up, there was a hairsbreadth second of blonde hair just ahead of her, and gone, and there it was again, the something she had seen was dress fabric, it drew itself round the corner at the last moment every time she came on the scene, until at last Alice reached the very center of the hedge maze, a topiary garden with a glass-top ironwork gazebo and fountain made of Poseidon's court rising out of the ocean in a great spray.
Whilst she took in this scene the Hatter came up, blustering into her in a rather blatant display of triumph. When he saw, however, that his victory had been superseded and the spirits and fun all gone out of their game, Alice tried to explain what she had seen, but the words didn't quite come out, and she stood just looking at him. He tilted his horns back and forth, spilling his supple waves of hair over them while contemplating the infinite with an agreeable sort of expression.
Alice, still looking at the velvet finish and thinking they were not bigger than her finger, plucked his elbow with a hardly-repressed smile and watched the Hatter leap forward, giving a soft "ah-ha!", through and between green silhouettes of waltzing couples, and then off back into the leaves over leaves at the other end. She waited to give him a proper head start, and just before she trod the step, Alice glanced over her shoulder.
"Let's go out," said the Hatter in a rich and plummy tone, plunking his cup and saucer somewhat carelessly next to him onto the settee. "This place is perfectly lovely."
The nice thing about the Grand Palais Hotel was not only its opulence and general feel of being the sort of place in which to take the cure, but the multitudes of odd asides and inglenooks Alice found once she grew stale of sighing before the fire and decided to toodle about. This delightful aspect owed its key element to the mass overgrowth of tropical ferns and broad-leafed plants parked in every open space, giving off a distinct feel of the exotic and the notion that perhaps the owners had forgot to put up walls where needed and thought greenery, that's just the thing.
She rather liked the place.
There was a genuine waterfall if one got lost and listened for the rushing sound right about where the parquetry bit off into granite tile—no one was there, nothing was there, in fact, and she stood watching mandarin ducks paddle round, inspecting imperiously this ambassador to their stately dominion. The lobby had a cylinder aquarium about the size of a house, with spiny fish, six-legged blue things, and other beings of the deep twiddling their appendages on the hulk of rock vaguely shadowed within. She climbed the iron-wrought circular staircase with proper balance, but the best part of that was standing on the ground floor, right beneath a domed skylight shaped like an eye, and when the sun was up and the sky was blue Alice looked into it, and it looked back down into her.
Sometimes it was silent, and she stood where no one could see her, looking for patterns in the curious wallpaper, a unique diagonal hatching that could only have been done by a patient hand. Past the concierge desk and through a reddish door with a stained glass panel she found passage to a Roman courtyard, where a narrow reflecting pool was flanked by two white ionic columns, supporting nothing, just there, waiting. Elegant furniture arrangements she found beneath staircase landings, but they were usually empty, and rather than seeming like filler, she found them strangely interesting, as though they had a secret history written in pencil on their undersides, perhaps taken down in six words or less. Her bedroom had pale green silk on the walls and over her bedside candle there fitted a globe of stained glass that threw lacy scripts and loops like a mandala onto the wall behind her headboard; the chandelier in her sitting room was held up by a silk rope that she could untie from the wall and gently lower to change out the glass-cupped candles.
Everything had detail. Everything could be observed.
It was tremendously beautiful, and she was growing just the least bit bored.
"Oh," she replied, surprised that he should mention it, considering their situation. "I wonder if it's a good idea, though."
"Oh, but don't you want to get out, go see things?" He stretched his arms at angles around him, bending his elbows and pulling as though to shake off dreaminess. Her fire ran hot and cozy, and he was barely flushed in the face, sitting near the open window as he was—though perhaps it was the confluence of temperature that had him in such a drowse. The Hatter finally slid down to lean his head against the divan back with a slight flop. Alice did not want to cause a scene and risk further penitence.
Still, if the white marble buildings she could see from the sitting room window were so lovely, then surely what was inside them was lovelier, and the people in them loveliest, and what lay beyond this set of buildings was likely, as the Hatter said, perfectly lovely.
They went ice skating.
The Hatter wore a fine hat, not too tall, not too big around or too wide a brim, and she was glad to see that bearing such subtlety on his person did not cause the poor man to droop and sigh with the unease that comes from being forced to give up one's personal hallmark; it covered enough of his eye-catching coif without being suspicious. Thus obscured and released into public, he continued this trajectory of cheerful languidity; Alice lost sight of the Hatter almost immediately after tightening the skate straps to her boots, and was alone in a small crowd for at least eight spins of the rink. She had not been on ice for a long time, but despite her togs, managed to cut an even keel, slicing through the dusted ice in graceful waves, shifting gently from one foot to the other, twisting full round and throwing one foot over in a wide arc, then beginning over again. Finally he came up at her in a too-close halt, having just stuffed his tea cup into an outer pocket.
"Come on," he said with an easy smile, and held out his hands, finally tossing the muff aside when she couldn't quite elect where to store it. Alice's elbows moved very slowly; she looked down at his gloves too long, and then his thumbs closed over her wrists; he pulled. It was easier to flow with his rhythm if she bent her knee enough to give their momentum room to work, and soon Alice felt it was enough to balance on one blade, the other foot raised to scrape along by the heel.
"You were right, it is nice to get out."
"Hmm?" His eyes had closed and he was standing as though perfectly still, coasting with kinetic backward motion, when his skates went into a divot and they both stumbled, Alice taking the brunt force of his hands clapping round her arms, but she was a steady girl and managed to salvage them both. "Oh," he said with genial humor upon looking round them at last when she had got them righted properly. "Ah." He took her arm rather loosely and they went on, side-by-side. "Sorry, what did you say?"
"How is your nose? Are you feeling any better?"
She watched him from below; tilted his profile down to look at her out of the side of his eye and relaxed into a broad contentedness, letting their arms fall to his side. "Wonderful," he said, chuckling. "Marvelous."
It was white in here, and he hated white—like this, anyway. He was sitting with his back wedged into the corner farthest from the door, not merely a physical manifestation of how deep he was in it, but also because he ached, and it was the only way he could breathe properly. Nothing was ever comfortable, though this was supposed to be better than the alternative. The Hatter didn't know, he couldn't remember if he knew what that was. It had been a long time he'd spent like this. But the white, it spread on and on, bright, yet flat and passive—spotless and pure, something he was supposed to aspire to, tolerable and placid. Sometimes he could see through the outside corner of his eye, just along the angles of the wall, fleeting colors and patterns, lines converging, reds and greys, spots and twisted amoebas.
They all left before he could see fast enough, though; they understood their own danger, and he let them—the Hatter and the colored patterns had an understanding that way. They'd run before they were forced out, and he'd keep his mouth shut. It was all very hush-hush, but he relished things like that. Secretly he was fascinated with the pattern of freckles that peeked out below the raw edge of his trouser—he always tucked his bare feet underneath himself whenever someone came in, certain that they would never know he had sixteen separate constellations spanning his right ankle to the smallest toe on his left foot, or that he could get them to change from a summer to a winter sky if he flexed his arches.
White was so bland, yet sometimes he could feel it beginning to quelch and close in on him, the white of the room looming over him like a henge. It crept up past his legs and consumed his torso; he couldn't quite pull his chin away from it. It got in his eyes and he tried to blow on it and dash it away, but it fell again soon after, drifting and piling, and drove him to push his forehead against the wall to grind it back.
The latch in the door was moving, and he curled his toes under in his rush to hide the constellations, sitting upright and very still, flush where the walls met in an overhead angle.
Rarely did the door open, and when it did, it was mostly people dressed in more white come to bother him and interrupt his counting the freckles up along his shins, which he had to do with great caution. On even rarer occasions there were other people, people he thought he recognized, but they did not speak to him the way he thought they ought to have, which was a great nuisance to everybody. Those people were not the people in white, but they tended toward that familiar colorway upon some apparent directive, choosing beige or whatever it was called.
The woman who entered and turned as though she were waiting for the person at the door to shut it was wearing a cloak that blent with the walls; he could barely see her until the door shut and clicked, because it was only then that she removed it and came into focus. Her dress underneath was blue—not pale foam atop the sea, not a frosted glacier, blue, a clear azure sky after the snow, cornflower, French blue, Wedgwood, a host of names that suddenly came to the crest of his lip unbidden. The Hatter, however, continued to gaze at her directly.
She did not immediately stride toward him, but stood politely at the door for a moment, apparently waiting for him to adjust to her presence, and when she did approach, it was smooth, unruffled by the state of him. The woman seated herself and arranged her skirts in a generous fan, plenty of blue for the looking.
"I've come to collect you," she said, right off. He fidgeted for a bit in lieu of an answer.
"You say that every time."
"Have I been here before?"
"You come here often, and you always say that, and just when I think it'll happen, I wake up and nothing's changed."
The woman thought about this for a moment before removing one of her gloves to gently comb her fingers through his white locks, pouring it back.
"There… that must be a bother, having that in your face and you not able to do anything with it." They sat in silence.
"She never does that," he said finally, and the room was so white right then that it nearly absorbed the words.
"Mmm," said the woman, and he fancied it might have been the most demulcent sound he'd ever heard. "We'll undo this, and you can stretch out. It's lovely in the garden this time of year, and I don't imagine you'd want to miss it." She brushed her fingertips into his hair again, but aimlessly this time.
"I'm not sure I want to."
"That's not true."
"I don't know how," and he shrugged, not quite a thrashing, but nonetheless he winced afterward. The woman sat back on her heels.
"You don't need me to save you, but I shall be glad to help you." He pulled his legs out and moved forward in a jerking motion. She reached behind him with both arms, set her cheek into his while she worked, and he could see past her shoulder a long trail of blue extending outward, bleeding over into the white at a huge perspective. When she sat back, he couldn't tell if she had gotten it or not. Carefully she pulled the too-long sleeves, but he was stuck; atrophied. "Oh dear," she said, inspecting him, "Are you frozen like that?"
She undid his arm, her hand at his elbow and the other pressed against his palm through the sleeve with the ends sewn shut: wound and unwound his pocketed wrist, rocked his arm back and forth in an open arc, pushed it folding back inward. It stung and needled, he hadn't felt his hands in recent time, but it twinged up through his neck and a whole set of nerve endings awoke in a kind of painful euphoria.
Later he lay buoyed and cushioned in the calm waters of the bathtub—he didn't need to look out the open window to see the garden in summer bloom, he knew it was there even with his eyes closed, it was so bright it lit up the walls. She was sitting on the bench outside with her elbow along the sill, sketching the hydrangea with a nub of charcoal—he could hear the soft scratching and knew she was right there. Sometimes she seemed to align with him, stack their thoughts atop one another and converge, and that was the best of all, he thought. The Hatter stretched out his arms in front of him, parallel to each other, and turned his palms up and then down, rolling in pleasure.
"Do you know what I've noticed most of all, though?" Alice said, turning and doing a doubletake to find that he was not just behind her as she'd thought. The Hatter was still over by the gallery doorway, bent over to inspect a painting of a beach party in winter, pinching his bottom lip and winding it between his fingers as it went slowly pink to red. She went back over to him; it wasn't a terribly interesting piece of art, as everyone was still done up in overcoats and dark bonnets—the sea roiled in the background and it was a rather somber affair, like a funeral for fresh oysters. He blinked into it, wide eyed and captivated.
"Hmm? Sorry, what?" The man turned to her and tilted his head to the side just so, still with his lip in hand. Alice glanced down at the pointed end of his large shoes and the matching dark socks, the way they contrasted with the herringbone pattern in the floor, as he began to rifle through his coat pocket for the rattling tea cup.
"Everyone here is at the forefront of their own private story," she told him. The Hatter sipped and spoke into his tea.
"How d'you mean?"
"Everyone is interesting, whether it's how they look or how they talk or act. Nobody sinks to the background, so nobody rises to the fore when everybody else is already there, though if they're all the same again, how does anybody distinguish themselves?" He spotted a window seat in an alcove directly behind a statue of a woman holding victorious a croquet mallet in one hand and a hedgehog over her head with the other, and steered them to it before it got poached off; the museum wasn't crowded, luckily.
"Like who?"
"At the hotel, say. There's a one-eyed porter who wears eyeglasses with one of the lenses painted black instead of a patch. Three women in the tearoom were all knitting the same hat, and none of them were sitting together, and none of them would even look at each other. There's got to be something fascinating about people who live that sort of life. But it's not just them, it's everybody, or at least it seems that way."
The Hatter sipped his tea and gazed off, deep in thought.
"But lots of people are like that, wouldn't you say? Isn't everybody really interesting, when you parse them correctly? I think you're just seeing them in a different way, perhaps."
"Sorry, who are we talking about?" A broad-faced woman in a plum walking dress was leaning on her parasol stick and shaking her head at the person standing next to her; the decorative balls dangling from her large hat trembled and spun.
"Oh, but she's such an amazing person in addition to being a skilled artist of so many disciplines," the other woman began gushing effusively to her companion in the statue's shadow, "You really must meet her, she has such a warm heart and a kind spirit, she's truly, truly wonderful."
"Well, people," said Alice, "People like them, for instance—"
"What's she done?"
"Her artwork, dear," the second woman went on in a loud voice, "She's an artist; words don't do justice to who she is, what she says, what she does, overall. You know, proper training is all well and good, but she just does this—"
Alice clucked her tongue, and lifting the Hatter at his elbow, strode to the opposite end of the room.
"Huh," he said, gesturing to the wall. There had been constructed a strange glass box jutting out just an inch or two around a rather obscene painting: a nude man and woman sat too-near one another on a rumpled bed, her fingers brushing the flesh of his wrist, his hand cupping and obscuring her breast, both blowsy and gazing into each other, intrigued and daring and just a hint smug. There was actually something in it, she thought, but Alice frowned.
"Is it valuable?"
"Shocking, quite shocking," said a young man from behind them, but he was murmuring it in an impressed way to the lady on his arm, who hushed him and looked about to see if the docents were paying attention.
"You aren't supposed to talk about the glassed ones," she said to Alice quietly, but kindly.
"Why not?"
"Some people just can't keep their rude opinions to themselves," replied the lady with a sage nod. And Alice watched the pair glide on to an open illustration, exclaiming at the line work and shading. She turned back to him to find the Hatter with the very tip of his nose brushing the glass, staring into it and holding his breath—but he was examining the folds in the backdrop fabric behind the pair, she thought. He might have been transfixed and even glassy-eyed at the presence of his own reflection for aught she knew. Thus so intent, she bent to examine the inscripted nameplate: by Her Luminous Excellence, the Queen of Diamonds, it read.
The Hatter was more expansive in the tearoom off the main boulevard where they both tucked in to bright red cake, and, upon Alice's preference, cups and cups of Darjeeling out of a pot the size of an ale tankard.
"You should try some of the ice wine," he was saying, pressing the back of his fork into the last smudge of white frosting and mulling over it, "It's quite the delicacy, I'm surprised they don't serve it in here. I bet the winery isn't far, though."
"Wine with ice in it?" Alice touched the lip of the creamer to her tea and watched the loose white cloud out across the surface.
"No, no," he chuckled, "They only harvest the grapes after they're frozen and stiff on the vine."
"They wouldn't get much, would they?"
"It's a small batch, and often nobody comes out with anything at all after a hard winter or desperate birds, but a good freeze makes the sweetest vintage."
"Oh, it's sweet, is it, how does it taste?"
"Fruity," said the Hatter, sipping and looking out the window. "Citrus, berry, bergamot. It changes and lingers, it tastes like a shiny dark red."
He wasn't up to anything the next day, waving her off with the assurance that he couldn't possibly contemplate anything beyond where he lounged in a sprawling way across the sofa, and so she wandered on her own until she came to a narrow tree-lined area between two white buildings, just smack right there, and it seemed promising; in she went.
Alice wasn't sure if it was an outdoor art exhibition or perhaps the public gardens, but very quickly the trees latticed out the sky and there began a series of panels, or screens, made of blond wood and linen, on either side of steep and moss-grown steps that angled down too fast. A just detectable movement like a solid wind turned into a very slow-looking river as she reached the bottom, heady and mysterious for all the steam coming off it. Rather curiously, this was an outdoor bath, attendants at hand. She turned toward the staircase to give the entrance a half-frown, contemplating going up all those stairs again. Then again, this was a holiday resort, and her feet were a bit chilly.
This kept happening, she had never been through so many treatments in such a short amount of time, and surely not so publicly, but there was something calming in the thick hazy air. Alice found herself undressed and sitting in an underwater stone cut-out at the deep bank's edge, a private alcove with a view onto the hot spring-fed waters. She was surrounded from behind by screens and a small linen hut, and it was so quiet that she had to be the only person alive. It wasn't so bad, really.
The spring temperature took some getting used to; it was a strange feeling, of water that never grew cold or faded against an iron tub. Hot, but not blistering—she shivered while submerged. Her hair curled with the eddying whirlpools that slipped around her arms; she sipped more tea—some local brew, it had been bitter at first but was greatly improving with time—and felt a soft safe undercurrent at her feet. The grass was crunchy behind the towel under her neck, but the great ancient forest on the opposite bank was misty, and she could pick out every shade of green and brown.
And then it began to snow.
She watched tufts of it fall out of the sky, and after the initial shock of it on her nose and cheeks, Alice was well in it. She leaned back to watch the grey turn into an ever-closer white, the break between the water surface and steam right at the center of her breast, the water lapping and the snow both giving her gooseflesh. It nearly stung after a while, being half cold and half hot. She looked down at herself, thought of the onion domes of St. Basil's, and then Alice felt terribly conspicuous, enough to dip low enough into the water that her collarbone disappeared. But after a while, her arms were so heavy and she let go of them, let them float up to the edge and fall, with snow falling on her face.
Alice felt loose and easy; the whole world was tucking itself around her, and she lifted the cup, tilted it briefly in a toast to the sky, and drank.
She stood on the aging porch, looking out across the grey and yellow fields where the black poplar copse split the sky, and saw a strange patch of dingy gold slanting upward. She followed it, and out in the fields and the wind and nothingness she found the large wingback chair dragged from the cottage parlor, a long pair of legs extending from it, capped with familiar brogued shoes. Alice put her hand on the right wing, stepped over his leg so she stopped between his feet, and then she put her hand on the other wing and they looked at each other like that.
She rather liked him, from the shining spots along his shoes, to the leisurely way he existed there in the chair with his head against the back, straight up to all those brown dots everywhere. She even liked his nose after all this time; it had a pleasing proportionality and a turned up way at the end full of youth, and the freckles there had always begun to crowd together as it wrinkled when he laughed. He was knocking the toes of his shoes against her boots lazily now, looking out behind her in the valley made hazy, and she couldn't remember why she was there, or how she'd got there.
"You alright?" asked Alice very quietly. And he just looked at her, not grinning or smiling like he used to, but with honesty and an open face said in an equally quiet voice, "Yeah." Keeping her hands upon the wings, Alice leaned in and pressed her lips carefully against his forehead, trailing the tip of her nose along as well. She moved to stand straight again, but he had one of her long curls that had got loose from the bun wrapped round his finger and was turning the end absently, not catching it or winding it, but just letting it spin, feeling the sensation against his bare hand.
Still twirling it over and under between his fingers, he stared at her quite openly in the short space. Alice looked into the thin starburst lines in his pale aqua irises and decided she liked those too. It was only when he began to have the air of a private joke that she tilted her head in silent question.
"It wants cutting," he said, not looking at the strand.
"You do it, and I'll shave your head while you're asleep," she said mock-viciously, and he grinned. But Alice took a length of string from her apron pocket, tied a ribbon above his fingertips, and with the silver shears she snipped it off, shining and golden. She looked at it there between her own fingers, and wondered if it was the last bit left of what she had once been when it first came out of her. She must be different now, and that difference would be new at her crown, wouldn't it? And she very nearly dropped it into his patient and contemplative palm, but just as it brushed the lines there, Alice stood up straight and took three skipping steps backward.
"You'd better get it before I throw it to the birds!" she cried, and just as she saw him come up out of the chair she turned, and ran wide open, her plain skirts flying above the boots, and they moved in great looping circles through the trees, screaming and laughing as she held the lock up high, teasing and ducking and dodging him as he let her keep away for the thrill.
She hid behind one of the poplars at last, holding her breath and trying to be inconspicuous, peeking round the trunk.
"You looking for something?" he said right next to her before she screamed, more in excitement than terror.
"How did you do that?" she said, for she was laughing too hard to say anything sensible.
"I'm everywhere," he said, chuckling and wiggling all his marble-tipped fingers at her spookily, the cut lock dangling between two of them.
They had been ambling up and down the pergola for some time, just enjoying the afternoon and doing nothing in particular. There wasn't any real point to it, except to see and be seen (or at least be acknowledged and quickly passed over), for the badminton season had not quite picked up, and there was no game in the courtyard at the center of the plaza. Across the street at high table they'd sucked down a pot of tea, and after that roast pork, goose pies, oyster stuffing (which the Hatter banished to Alice's far side of the table with a shudder and the evil eye), lemon-cheese tarts, seared asparagus, cream soup with sliced almonds, brown bread, white bread, salmon, trifle, quince jelly, walnut cake, currant teacake, curd tart, several more teas from the samovar cart, and also with the dessert a clear carafe of the dark red ice wine which Alice did have to admit was just the right shade of sweet and went down most refreshingly.
The Hatter had, between bites of a pudding, taken several deep breaths—deep breaths, filling up his lungs all the way that Alice was given pause he might accidentally inhale and choke on a plum. But if you have ever taken a meal so rich and thick and been so stuffed that in breathing your shoulders rise and you feel full of the world and truly at your best, you will know how the Hatter felt, and you will know the secret spot of jealousy in Alice that he could do such a thing.
Nevertheless, she was brimmed to the gills with it all, and happily went roaming in the gloaming with the Hatter; he was in a cheerful mood, for he bore an immensely satisfied smile, followed by a sigh of contentment every few steps. He even hummed a few bars of an overture from some opera Alice knew but couldn't call to mind the name of. It was a beautiful evening, and she bounced the end of her parasol in the mortar between the cobblestones, strrrick, strrrick, strrrrick. Pausing before a marble bench and turning, he was at the high point of a rather funny story about how he'd once been treed at a society garden party by some no-account viscount's yappy lap dog—or as he would have had her believe it, a hellbeast with slathering nine-inch fangs and a keen mind for a vendetta that seemed to center around the last leg of some roast beast, when Alice heard a strange sound. It was someone laughing, but she didn't recognize the laugh itself—it was the voice that was so familiar, and upon getting it into her head to turn and see who it was, she caught the look on the Hatter's face just before he hit the bench, and her mind moved in a strange way; Alice stood close up near his knee and bloomed open wide the parasol over her back.
Passing just behind them, and laughing, went arm in arm a startling pair indeed—it was the Count, in a brand new Chesterfield, and with him, one long thick rope of hair let down her back so the very end looped over in a curl, was the Duchess, swinging her parasol end over end. Alice could not hear the gist of the Count's jest, but she did tilt back with a sick dyspeptic mass in her stomach to peek around her linen shade and watch the other woman actually take a step as a hop-skip and look very pleasant and at her leisure in being on holiday in this, a holiday resort town.