They had met in front of an ancient manor house between Bristol and the forest, and a wall; old but unbreached, it rejected curious farmers or rusticating noblemen as effectively as it had once withheld the minatory Puritans while the Cavaliers of the house exchanged wives and disported with wenches.  The balloon, almost filled now with hydrogen gas encompassed in large wooden casks and piped through rubber tubes, bulged above the wall like the head of Cyclops looking for Ulysses.

"It looks magnificent," said Deirdre, who wore a simple gown of chintz and calico - no farthingale for a balloon! - with a wide straw hat to protect her from the sun.  She had brought her mahogany cane, but whatever pain she felt did not becloud her face.  Radiant with expectation, she reminded Dylan of a little London girl on a visit to Bath.  Not that she was either little or a girl, but she looked so uncommonly young, so credulous of miracles.  Damned if he hadn't grown distractedly fond of her!  She was that cruelest of temptresses; the woman who, unaware of alluring, treats a man like a brother and thinks of a bed as a place for repose and sleep.

"Magnificent it does," he said, eying the swollen globe and wondering how thin taffeta varnished with elastic gum could assume such noble proportions.

"Twenty-seven feet in diameter," said the inventor, a vinegar-looking fellow known as Squirrel because he hoarded facts as a squirrel hoards nuts.  He liked to mouth statistics; rarely wrong, he felt that they answered any question, religious, philosophical, aesthetic, or in this case physical.  (The world was created in the year 4004 B.C. ...  David  at the height of his power enjoyed nine wives and eighteen concubines. ... The fields around Bristol meet the Not-World precisely two and a half miles from the manor house. ...  "Now we must calculate the weight she'll have to carry."  (She was named the Celestial Moll at Adeline's suggestion, "because, so to speak, she will kick her heels in the air.")  "And you, Dylan?  How much do you weigh?"

"Six feet tall.  Hundred and seventy."  Dylan, who treated his hair like a flock of crows to be captured by his hat and never looked at his face in a mirror, was excessively proud of his height.  Since he had known Arachne, burliness had become ranginess.

"I didn't ask for your height.  I hardly think you'll bump your head, since there isn't a roof to the car."  Squirrel disliked unnecessary statistics, as his animal namesake disliked stones which he found among his nuts.  "And you, Mistress Deirdre?"

"A hundred and ten."

"Could stand a bit o' plumpenin'," Dylan remarked.  "Have to taste my slumgullion.  Puts meat on the ribs."

"Will you kindly refrain from your non sequiturs till I have completed my calculations?  And you, Madame, uh, my Lady?"

"A hundred and thirty," said Adeline, looking covertly at Dylan.  "Or thereabouts."