Bob cinched an arm around the narrowest part of her waist and hoisted her into the air with a thrust of rather good thigh-muscles. Her head grazed a dusty ceiling-beam and she ducked and hugged his head. He yanked a blanket from a couch; the books that had been scattered all over the blanket ended up differently scattered on the couch. Carrying Eliza and dragging the blanket, he trudged in a mighty floorboard-popping cadence to an elliptical dining-table scattered with the remains of a scholarly dinner: apple-peels and gouda-rinds. Making a slow orbit of this he flipped the corners of the tablecloth into the center. Gathering them together turned the tablecloth into a bag of scraps, which he let down gently onto the floor. Then he broadcast the blanket onto the table, slapped it once with his palm to stop it from skimming right off, and rolled Eliza's body out into the middle of the woolly oval.