Chapter 9 Summary

The Duchess appears and acts quite friendly towards Alice, walking arm and arm with her and delivering all sorts of inappropriate and useless bits of wisdom, like, "love makes the world go round." Alice reminds the Duchess of her own earlier statement that it was minding one's own business made it go round. Alice finds that conversing with the Duchess, who tries to find a moral in every trivial word uttered, from flamingos to mustard, is quite unbearable. Fortunately, the Queen appears and orders the Duchess to leave or lose her head, whereupon the woman disappears. The Queen then takes Alice to visit an animal called the Mock Turtle. "I don't even know what a Mock Turtle is." "It's the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from," replies the Queen.

A fantastic mythical animal, the Gryphon, escorts Alice to see the Mock Turtle...