The Old Man and Me by Elaine Dundy Page B

nowadays.”
    “Oh?”
    “Haven’t got the kilns!”
    “Haven’t got the
kilns
?”
    “That’s right, sir. Haven’t got the kilns.”
    “Ah.”
    “You see, sir, you’re going to need a pretty good-sized kiln to get one of those animals into, aren’t you? I mean to say, sir, one of your ordinary kilns isn’t going to do the trick, is it? And that’s the trouble, sir, they aren’t building kilns that
size
any more.” He’d gotten quite worked up about it.
    “Well, well, mustn’t grumble,” said C. D. soothingly. “It’s the same all over nowadays, isn’t it?”
    “Yes, sir, I expect it is. I am sorry.”
    “Come along, my dear.”
    “Good-day, Sir. Madam.”
    “Goodbye.”
    “I’m beginning to enjoy this,” I said back in the sunshine again. “What shall we try to buy next—the Tower of London?”
    But C. D. only murmured softly to himself, “Always wondered what the silly things cost,” and continued majestically down the street.
    The woman walking towards us was staring at us very hard. She even stopped to follow us round as we passed.
    Gallantly C. D. tipped his hat. She smiled and walked on.
    “Who was that?” I asked.
    “Haven’t the faintest idea. Thought she looked jolly pleased to know me though, what?” And he cocked a merry eyebrow in my direction. And he stepped out smartly, jauntily swinging his umbrella.

Part Two

6
    The antique fair, an Event of the Season, gets run off every year at a great gallop in one of those semi-official town houses of most elegant and ambitious proportions on Park Lane. Enter and ascend a billowing baroque staircase (imagine myself gravely on the arm of the Archduke, while a thousand violins swell into a Viennese waltz) and you will find yourself in no time standing directly in front of the Main Exhibition Room, a room stuffed
to swarming with extravagant-looking people and extravagant-looking objects—crystal, silver, china, the paintings, the tapestries, the furniture, the carpets, chandeliers...antiques, antiques, antiques. Pile upon pile, one great, enormous junk shop.
    C. D. paused under the archway, breathing dedicatedly. Picture if you will a C. D. gone mad. A bull in a china shop—an aesthetic bull that is—a bull run mad on aestheticism. For if American education had struck him as eclecticism run mad he was striking me as aestheticism run mad. His eyes shone and darted about ferociously coveting all they beheld. His mouth salivated (at least he licked it several times in a kind of mopping up gesture), his hands clenched and unclenched, his brow perspired; a most unnatural fever seemed to have overtaken him. And then he got a grip on himself, marched boldly into the room, took a good look around him and relaxed. And he looked upon everything and everywhere in that old man’s way of his that struck me now as being also like that of a very young baby—so lovingly, so wonderingly. But with an avidity too, that avidity special to C. D. A hungry look cast upon each object of beauty as it flowed and filled and satisfied the innermost reaches of his soul. His eyes would seize upon the object with the impatience of youth, then—here was the difference—come to terms with it; set it down: the eyes avidly picking up each beloved object in salutation—putting it down gently in farewell. Eyes look your last! Strange old man, heartbreaking, heart-broken old man—to be so moved by the polish of wood, the curve of a chair-leg, the glint of crystal, the fade of Aubusson. As though he were missing it all already.
    At last C. D. smiled, his communion over. “Well, what d’you think of it all? Splendid, isn’t it?”
    “I’m remembering the Botany class Leaf Hunt. Am I going to have to learn all of this too?”
    “You got fifty out of sixty,” he reminded me.
    “But I was five years younger then.”
    “And five years stupider, I should think,” he said crisply. “Now then, look sharply and tell me where you’d like to begin.”
    “At