Calcifer chuckled. “I’ve never seen anyone got rid of so fast!” he said.

This made Sophie feel both unkind and guilty. After all, she herself had walked into the castle in much the same way, and she had been twice as nosy as Miss Angorian. “Gah!” she said. She stumped into the bathroom and stared at her withered old face in the mirrors. She picked up one of the packets labeled SKIN and then tossed it down again. Even young and fresh, she did not think her face compared particularly well with Miss Angorian’s. “Gah!” she said. “Doh!” She hobbled rapidly back and seized ferns and lilies from the sink. She hobbled them, dripping, to the shop, where she rammed them into a bucket of nutrition spell. “Be daffodils!” she told them in a mad, angry, croaking voice. “Be daffodils in June, you beastly things!”

The dog-man put his shaggy face round the yard door. When he saw the mood Sophie was in, he backed out again hurriedly. When Michael came merrily in with a large pie a minute later, Sophie gave him such a glare that Michael instantly remembered a spell Howl had asked him to make up and fled away through the broom cupboard.

“Gah!” Sophie snarled after him. She bent over her bucket again. “Be daffodils! Be daffodils!” she croaked. It did not make her feel any better that she knew it was a silly way to behave.

Chapter Nineteen

IN WHICH SOPHIE EXPRESSES HER FEELINGS WITH WEED-KILLER

Howl opened the shop door toward the end of the afternoon and sauntered in, whistling. He seemed to have got over the mandrake root. It did not make Sophie feel any better to find he had not gone to Wales after all. She gave him her very fiercest glare.

“Merciful heavens!” Howl said. “I think that turned me to stone! What’s the matter?”

Sophie only snarled, “What suit are you wearing?”

Howl looked down at his black garments. “Does it matter?”

“Yes!” growled Sophie. “And don’t give me that about being in mourning! Which one is it really?”

Howl shrugged and held up one trailing sleeve as if he were not sure which it was. He stared at it, looking puzzled. The black color of it ran downward from his shoulder into the pointed, hanging tip. His shoulder and the top of his sleeve grew brown, then gray, while the pointed tip turned inkier and inkier, until Howl was wearing a black suit with one blue-and-silver sleeve whose end seemed to have been dipped in tar. “That one,” he said, and let the black spread back up to his shoulder again.

Sophie was somehow more annoyed than ever. She gave a wordless grump of rage.

“Sophie!” Howl said in his most laughing, pleading way.

The dog-man pushed open the yard door and shambled in. He never would let Howl talk to Sophie for long.