She did mind that and shook an obdurate head; she did not like her fathers hard, dry, imperative kisses, and ehem only for the sake of power. Sometimes Emma touched her cheek lightly with unparted lips. Lizzie would allow no more. The man sighed when she shook her head, took her hand away from the crotch, softly folded it up on its fingers and gave her hand ceremoniously back to her.
"Gratuity," he said, felt in his pocket and nipped her a heraightened up and walked away. Lizzie put the in her pinafore pocket and, after a moments thought, stumped off after the funny man along the still, secret edges of the field, curious as to what he might do .
But now surprises were going on all round her in the bushes, mewings, squeaks, rustlings, although the funny man paid no attention to them, not even when a stately fat woman rose up under his feet, huge as a moon and stark but for her stays, but for black cotton stogs held up by garters with silk rosettes on them, but for a majestic hat of black leghorn with feathers. The woman addressed the drunken man angrily, in a language with a good many ks in it, but he ploughed on indifferently and Lizzie scuttled unseen after, casting an inquisitive backward glance. She had never seen a womans naked breasts since she could remember, and this pair of melons jiggled entrangly as the fat woman shook her fist in the wake of the funny man before she parted her thighs with a wet smad sank down on her knees again in the grass in whiething unseen moaned.
Then a person scarcely as tall as Lizzie herself, dressed up like a little drummer-boy, somersaulted -- head over heels -- directly across their paths, muttering to himself as he did so. Lizzie had just the time to see that, although he was small, he was not shaped quite right, for his head seemed to have been pressed into his shoulders with some violence, but then he was gone.
Dont think any of this frightened her. She was not the kind of child that frightens easily.
Then they were at the back of a tent, not the big, striped tent, but another, smaller tent, where the funny man fumbled with the flap much as he had fumbled with his trousers. A bright mauve, ammoniac reek pulsed out from this tent; it was lit up inside like a ese lantern and glowed. At last he mao unfasten a inside. He did not so much as attempt to close up after him; he seemed to be in as great a hurry as the tumbling dwarf, so she slipped through too, but as soon as she was inside, she lost him, because there were so many other people there.
Feet of ers had worn all the grass from the ground and it had been replaced by sawdust, which soon stuck all over the mudpie Lizzie had bee. The tent was lined with cages on wheels, but she could not see high enough to see what was ihem, yet, mixed with the everyday chatter around her, she heard strange cries that did not e from human throats, so she knew she was on the right track.
She saw what could be seen: a young couple, arm in arm, he whispering in her ear, she giggling; a group of three grinning, gaping youths, poking sticks within the bars; a family that went down in steps of size, a man, a woman, a boy, a girl, a boy, a girl, a boy, a girl, down to a baby of ierminate sex in the womans arms. There were many more present, but these were the people she took at of.
The gagging stench was worse than a summer privy and a savage hullabaloo went on all the time, a r as if the sea had teeth.
She eel