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Across the way gas-lit windows glowed like squares on some great, blurred checker-board. The roadway teemed with shrieking children. Somewhere near at hand a pianola lost its temper and whaled the everlasting daylights out of an inoffensive melody from "The Pink Lady." Other, more diffident instruments tinkled apologetically in the distance.
Thank goodness, the young fellow had shaved off his half-toothbrushes, and no longer looked like a mountebank! With a girl friend of Fleur's who was staying in the house, and a neighbouring youth or so, they made two couples after dinner, in the hall, to the music of the electric pianola, which performed Fox-trots unassisted, with a surprised shine on its expressive surface.
Direck's mood was an immense solemnity, like a dark ocean beneath the vast dome of the sky, and something quivered in every fibre of his being, like moonlit ripples on the sea. He felt at the same time a portentous stillness and an immense enterprise.... Then suddenly the pianola, pounding a cake walk, burst out into ribald invitation....
Singing popular songs, a pianola, half a dozen fox terriers, laughing and shouting good nights in the corridors kept us awake half the night, and worst of all, what we patiently submitted to as visitors with children, we, to our horror, discovered were residents with children, and children of the most detested sort at that. Five of these hyenas in human form lived below us.
He had to fall back upon the pianola, and try to play duets with that. Only the pianola did all the duet itself, and in the hands of a small Britling was apt to betray a facetious moodiness; sudden alternations between extreme haste and extreme lassitude....
What with the pianola going all out, the gramophone giving us Melba records, and the ship's company's gramophone squawking out Harry Lauder's opposition numbers, Ponting cinematographing everything of interest and worthy of pictorial record, little Anton rushing round with nosebags for the ponies, Meares and Dimitri careering with the dog teams over ice, beach, packing cases, and what not, sailors with coloured tam-o'-shanters bobbing around in piratical style, the hot sun beating down and brightening up everything, one might easily have imagined this to be the circus scene, in the great Antarctic joy-ride film.
The pianola stopped, they all chatted indiscriminately. Jim was watching the new-comer Mrs. Browning with a concentrated wolfish grin. "I like her," he said at last. "I've seen her before, haven't I? I like her awfully." "Yes," said Josephine, with a slight grunt of a laugh. "He wants to be loved." "Oh," cried Clariss. "So do I!" "Then there you are!" cried Tanny.
The particular advantage of Blodgett's, besides the fact that you could have two helps of everything without paying extra for it, was that it was exclusive and social. Mrs. Blodgett had collected her family of boarders on the principle of not having anybody who wasn't a suitable companion for Aggie. There was also a pianola which gave the place a tone.
There is one lamp and one table, and one stove, and unless papa plays the pianola there is nothing to do but talk. No one reads, and only one woman does a little embroidery, while the small girl of the party cuts out scraps from a fashion paper.
Someone bustled in with a torrent of talk, and the pianola was drowned in a pandemonium of shouts and laughter. "Windy Jim's reely got back!" Everybody crowded forward. Maudie was at the Colonel's elbow explaining that the little yellow-bearded man with the red nose was the letter-carrier. He had made a contract early in the winter to go to Dawson and bring down the mail for Minóok.
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