POLICEMAN. Stand up. CINDERELLA. I’m st...

POLICEMAN. Stand up.

CINDERELLA. I’m standing up.

POLICEMAN. Now, no sauce. Now then, what are you staring at?

CINDERELLA. That’s a poor way to polish a belt. If I was a officer I would think shame of having my belt in that condition.

POLICEMAN. It’s easy to speak; it’s a miserable polish I admit, but mind you, I’m pretty done when my job’s over; and I have the polishing to do myself.

CINDERELLA. You have no woman person?

POLICEMAN. Not me.

CINDERELLA. If I had that belt for half an hour!

POLICEMAN. What would you use?

CINDERELLA. Spit.

POLICEMAN. Spit? That’s like what my mother would have said. That was in Badgery, where I was born. When I was a boy at Badgery—

CINDERELLA. What’s wrong?

POLICEMAN. How did you manage that about Badgery?

CINDERELLA. What?

POLICEMAN. Take care, prisoner. Name?

CINDERELLA. Cinderella.

POLICEMAN. Take care, Thing. Occupation, if any?

CINDERELLA. Tempary help.

POLICEMAN. Last place?

CINDERELLA. 3 Robert Street.

POLICEMAN. Scotch? Ah, they’ll never admit that. Reason for leaving?

CINDERELLA. I had to go when the war broke out.

POLICEMAN. Why dismissed?

CINDERELLA. They said I was a luxury.

POLICEMAN. Now be cautious. How do you spend your evenings after you leave this building? Have you another and secret occupation? Has it to do with boxes? What do you keep in those boxes? Where is it that these goings-on is going on? If you won’t tell me, I’m willing to tell you. It’s at A. C. Celeste’s.... In Bond Street, W. Are you living in guilty splendour? How do you come to know German words? How many German words do you think I know? Just one, espionage. What’s the German for ‘six months hard’? What’s this nonsense about your feet?

CINDERELLA. It’s not nonsense.

POLICEMAN. I see nothing particular about your feet.

CINDERELLA. Then I’m sorry for you.

POLICEMAN. What is it?

CINDERELLA. Their exquisite smallness and perfect shape.

POLICEMAN. For my part I’m partial to big women with their noses in the air.

CINDERELLA. So is everybody. I’ve tried. But it’s none so easy, with never no butcher’s meat in the house. You’ll see where the su-perb shoulders and the haughty manners come from if you look in shop windows and see the whole of a cow turned inside out and ‘Delicious’ printed on it.

POLICEMAN. There’s something in that.

CINDERELLA. But it doesn’t matter how fine the rest of you is if you doesn’t have small feet.

POLICEMAN. I never gave feet a thought.

CINDERELLA. The swells think of nothing else. Wait till you are at the Ball. Many a haughty beauty with superb uppers will come sailing in—as sure of the prize as if ‘Delicious’ was pinned on her—and then forward steps the Lord Mayor, and he points to the bottom of her skirt, and he says ‘Lift!’ and she has to lift, and there’s a dead silence, and nothing to be heard except the Prince crying ‘Throw her out!’

Citation: J.M. Barrie, A Kiss for Cinderella, Public domain.

Full text: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/69817/pg69817-images.html