At half-past ten years old, Laura went to school and then came home
again, with the simple directness of the King of France.
It was her own fault, as she candidly admitted to herself—her own,
Justin’s a little, still more Mr. Kipling’s, but mainly and responsibly,
her own. You observe that she did not blame Aunt Adela at all. She was
always a just child.
And yet, of course, it was Aunt Adela who had been anxious for at least
a year that Laura should go to school, who had said so, plaintively,
once to Papa, who did not commit himself, and incessantly to
Brackenhurst; for boarding schools had a Refining Influence ... and
Companionship, you know ... and she had a bosom friend, a Miss
Massingberd, such an Intellectual woman, who had recently opened a
school and needed pupils....
Upon the horns of that altar Aunt Adela intended that Laura, entirely
for her own good, should be offered up; for Aunt Adela was indefatigably
benevolent at second hand. She used to make opportunity for little chats
with Laura, and paint flamboyant pictures of the delights that awaited
her if she would only tell Gran’papa that she should like to go to
school. (Already the household was finding Laura a convenient mediator.)
Laura listened politely, with her head on one side, like a wary robin.
But she, too, did not commit herself.
One unlucky morning, however, fate overtook her.
She was engaged at the time in the particularly fascinating occupation
of tidying Mrs. Cloud’s wardrobe drawers. If I were Laura, I could write
a poem on Mrs. Cloud’s wardrobe, big as a little house, brown and
grained and polished like a horse-chestnut or a ha’penny bun, with its
clinking handles and the long looking-glass door, which, as it swung
open, reflected in the mantel-glass opposite your own side face,
unfamiliar, gratifying. It had dark shelves that ran up like
ladder-rungs to the ceiling—but they pulled out disconcertingly if you
tried to climb—and great drawers in which you could easily have hidden
Prince Charlie (lying flat with blouses over him) what time the Butcher
and his Southrons clanked up the stairs. Oh, the long shelves and the
deep draws it had, all vaguely sweet with orris-root and lemon-weed, and
the piles of smooth linen (Laura’s night-dresses were flannel, a
hygienic brown) and the tiny scented bags that dropped from them, tied
up with rainbow ribbons! And there were boxes—Japanese boxes—each with
its special smell of lace or leather, and its name upon its lid in
golden handwriting; and a little wicker basket where the dead gloves
went, that Laura might take for finger-stalls or gardening; and shawls
for dressing-up, and a feather fan, and a scarf from India all sewn over
with silver and as heavy as a tennis net, for playing mermaids. There
was a piece-drawer like _Mrs. S. F. Robinson’s_ enchanted bag; and a
carved comb six inches high and once, in a corner, candles and glass
balls from last year’s Christmas tree; and little trinket cases that
Laura was allowed to open, and the great jewel box with the baize
petticoat that was always locked because it had diamonds inside it, and
Justin’s watch, and more rings than would go on all Laura’s fingers,
counting thumbs.
The sea hath its pearls, and argosies unload in London Town; but have
you ever tidied Mrs. Cloud’s wardrobe?
Tidying (she called it tidying!) this delectable wardrobe that day, what
should Laura come upon but a fat bundle which, deposited with the dumb
eloquence of a retriever on Mrs. Cloud’s lap, was deprived of its
elastic band and displayed to her as a sheaf of reports—Justin’s reports
at his preparatory school. She was allowed to go through them, and
because she could not help wheedling explanations out of a particularly
busy Mrs. Cloud, to read to herself a few, a very few, of Justin’s
letters home. Here was literature indeed! There was Shakespeare, no
doubt: there was the _B. O. P._ There was Louisa Alcott and Sir Thomas
Malory; but what were such scribblers then to Laura reading Justin’s
letters home?
To top that revelation came _Stalky and Co._ for a birthday present.
Naturally she dreamed of going to school herself. In that mood Aunt
Adela surprised her, and, striking while the iron was hot, settled
matters with her, with her own friend, and with Papa, who wrote, in grim
silence, the necessary cheques. He had never approved of boarding
schools for his women-folk.
Neither did Laura. The door of the prim drawing-room had not closed
behind Aunt Adela, she had barely rubbed Aunt Adela’s farewells from her
cheeks, before she had realized that she had been trapped again, that
she hadn’t intended to go to school, that she would never meet _Beetle_
at ‘The Laburnums,’ and that she was stuck there for a term at least,
because, when there is a chance that they may be read by Mrs. Cloud who
would tell Justin, one does not fill one’s letters home with
supplications and lamentings. Justin never once said that he wanted to
come back!... Finally, she was going to be horribly homesick....
She was. She was put into the lowest class and she hated every one.
Exile, of the body or of the mind, always roused, and always will rouse
in her, I think, a bitter, ardent devil, that, when she was a child, was
completely beyond her comprehension or control. She, who was all for
peace and pleasantry and quiet life, found herself involved in wars and
rumours of wars, in quarrels and injustice and defiances, that stamped
themselves heavily, like a blind pattern, upon a solid background of
nostalgia, so that she spent her days, like any cat, fighting and
dreaming.
She endured for a full term: packed, in spite of protests, all her
property at the end of it: bade a polite and final farewell to a
bewildered head-mistress, and then came home again. Once there, she
refused to budge.
She needed a whipping, of course. Brackenhurst, deeply interested, urged
it upon Aunt Adela. But somehow it was difficult to inflict upon the
soft-eyed, mouse-like creature that was Laura—until you roused her. And
Laura never let Aunt Adela rouse her now-a-days, was a good little girl
and an obedient, with her Aunt Adela. As Adela admitted to Brackenhurst,
she was, in daily life, docile enough. Aunt Adela, who could not
understand her contradictions, never realized that you might prune as
you pleased—if you left her roots alone.
But Laura had it out with a grimly smiling grandfather, who did not
appear surprised. He heard what she had to say, discussed the matter
with her as he never did with Adela, and, to every one’s horror, let her
have her way. Possibly Laura’s challenge to her aunt—“Why can’t
Gran’papa teach me? He knows tons more than Miss Massingberd”—tickled
him.
At any rate Laura stayed at home, and her education, as it achieved
itself between the two of them, with occasional help from Justin, was,
if irregular, at least essentially satisfying. She was, of course, if
you contrast her provision with the full fare of the schools, fed and
clad but scantily; but her scraps fell at least from ambrosial tables
and her rags were cloth-of-golden. And she throve. That is certain.
Aunt Adela’s next move, naturally, was to demand a governess. But even
her assiduity had not been able to discover any one whom Gran’papa could
endure for more than a month. A week was usually enough for them both.
With visitors, half-hour visitors, he found it hard enough to be
uncritical; but to have a stranger, and a feminine stranger at that,
with an inevitable mannerism to jar his fidgety niceness, definitely
established in his household, drove him into a fever of nervous
irritation. His patient daughter did her best, but it required more
nerve than she possessed to say, however sweetly, to an efficient young
woman with certificates and a silk petticoat: “Oh, by the way, Miss—er—,
you _don’t_ blow your nose at meals, do you?” and after the rout of Miss
Runciman with her nervous little giggle, of Miss Sandys who would talk
to Papa while he was eating, and of Miss Jenkins who used slang and
dropped her g’s, Aunt Adela decided that an English girl without an
affectation was beyond discovery, and that Papa must look after Laura’s
education by himself. Can you hear her _sotto-voce_ indignation? Can you
see her washing her long, twitching hands of the whole affair? There is
no doubt but that Papa was exceedingly trying. All Brackenhurst knew it
and pitied the poor lady. But neither Brackenhurst nor she herself ever
had the moral courage to tell him so.
Laura, however, was none the worse off. She could read and write, had
the run of two houses in the matter of books, and Justin—never again so
divinely discerning—Justin had given her a paint-box. Thus equipped, she
was left to potter at her own pace along the road to knowledge of those
inner and outer worlds in which, for the next fifty years or so, she was
to stage her eternal comedy of existence.
And she enjoyed herself. At ten—twelve—fourteen—she enjoyed herself,
æsthetically at least, as keenly and painfully as at any later period,
blissfully absorbed in words and colours and sounds, in discovering that
the sky is awfully blue and the earth so green, so green; but that if
she said big words to herself from Gran’papa’s dictionary, ‘azure,’
‘translucent,’ ‘emerald,’ ‘lapis-lazuli,’ sky and earth would deepen and
glow till she was dazzled, and that, although she could not get what she
saw on to paper, juicy as Winsor and Newtons were, at least she could
always try. And there the sable paint-brush was certainly a help, though
expensive!
And though in these, as in all her adventures, she was unescorted, she
was not lonely. She was always aware that there were guiding hands to
right and left of her if she chose to stretch out her own. Hands,
indeed, that were inclined to tug in opposite directions, and so,
perhaps, held her the steadier between extreme and extreme; for an
intelligent young man convinced that he understands everything, and a
wise old one, still more sure that he knows nothing, are no bad teachers
for an imaginative child, who worships the one and honours the others.
Justin, because she saw less of him; because he was young; because he
made her laugh; because he forgot her for months and then remembered her
again; because he let her play in his room and learn her geography from
his stamp album, and put her in charge, in his absence, of his
innumerable collections; because he had white teeth and delightful
crinkles at the corners of his eyes when he put back his head and
laughed at her; because, in short, he was God—Justin, naturally,
influenced her development more than old Mr. Valentine, though he, in
his cold way, was less unconscious of responsibility than Aunt Adela
would have you believe. Yet the amazing, amusing contrast in the two
men’s attitudes to life and Books (the choice of capital is Laura’s)
developed in her, all unconsciously, a sense of humour, which is a sense
of proportion, that never withered, though she is to starve it
ruthlessly in the years that are labelled discreet.
When, for instance, Gran’papa’s grudging and suspicious recognition of
those hot-bloods Mr. Tennyson and Mr. Dickens, was compared in her alert
mind with Justin’s yawning admission that he really must wade through
’em all some day, she would give a little gurgle of laughter all to
herself, though she did not really know why. But she was sure her mother
would have laughed too in that half-forgotten fascinating way of hers
and have made the funniness obvious to Laura. Laura was sure of that.
Even _Sam Weller_ was not quite so funny when you met him by
yourself—but when Mother had read it aloud—oh, did the twins remember?
But the twins never remembered anything. Never remembered, never cared
for anything but trains, and rigging up telephones in the cherry trees,
and catapulting robins, never wanted Laura except at night when there
were stories to be told, or when they quarrelled with each other in the
day-time. And certainly never noticed much difference between the
edition of _Alice_ that Gran’papa produced from a corner of his
bookshelf one birthday and the parcel from Justin by the post, with the
same familiar letterpress and most unfamiliar drawings by a certain
sacrilegious Mr. Rackham. There again Gran’papa’s indignation, though
she agreed with him, struck her as humorous. In short, she was
beginning, what with one mentor and the other, to form a judgment of her
own, not to mention a morality. The fundamental ‘shalt nots,’ built up
secretly, like coral rocks, in her childish deeps, were, in the lull
that precedes the teens, beginning to show starkly above water.
“Never, never cry.
“It’s nice to be in the right, but it makes them squash you.
“Never argue with Gran’papa.
“Never remind Justin of what he said last holidays.
“Never say you’re tired.”
In matters of art, too, though she enjoyed trying to look through both
ends of her human opera-glasses at once, she had got into a habit (in
self-defence, as if it were) of using her own eyes in daily life.
Glasses were a revelation, of course, either end of them. Justin’s
display of remote, romantic figures with curvy throats who really lived,
in London, and waved Yellow Books (a horrid colour) and sniffed at
Gran’papa’s Michael Angelo because he had a broken nose and couldn’t
sniff back, was as exciting as it was bewildering; but Gran’papa’s
method of magnifying, clarifying the old-fashioned deities of an art
dictionary into solid, satisfactory men and women, had also its charm
for her. And the woman in her, that must dislike change of any kind,
found Gran’papa the more dependable. Justin had such different interests
each holidays (he left delicious books behind him when he went back to
college) that it was difficult to keep up; but Gran’papa would, on any
given evening, be found reading the _Noctes Ambrosianae_ with the same
absorption as on any previous evening of all Laura’s years: Gran’papa
could be trusted to say—“Pretty enough, pretty enough—but what about
feet? Hands and feet, my dear, hands and feet, if you want to learn to
draw,” when he was shown the latest ‘head’ (there were half a dozen
battered casts for the borrowing—Cæsar, Clytie, Antinous—in the village
schools) upon which Laura had spent herself and her time and her
beautiful fourpenny indiarubber.
Yes—Gran’papa was dependable. He damped her, but she was already
intelligent enough to enjoy the tingle of his cold water, and, always
protesting, to know him in the right. Yet how she grudged him his
rightness! At twelve years old there is not much charm in a plaster cast
of a foot or in a muscular gentleman with his skin off, when Clytie,
half enchanted, smiles from her petals, and you have made up your mind
to do the most beautiful copy of her that the world has ever seen by
lunch-time, only coloured, pale pink Clytie and orange sunflower, and
send it in to the Academy and get made an R.A. like Angelica Kaufmann,
who wasn’t even English, as a little surprise for Justin.
She was always, in secret, fantastically ambitious, but her R.A. was one
cobweb with her Helen of Troyship (you should have seen Laura going
straight to headquarters—Olympus—and talking out the whole wretched
business with Zeus) or with the regency she undertook after delivering
up Elizabeth (in chains) to Mary Queen of Scots, reinstated and regal
and happily converted to Protestantism entirely through Laura’s
indefatigable personal exertions. For Laura, to Aunt Adela’s edified
relief, was whole-heartedly Anglican, in spite of having to learn
collects. She did not explain, if she knew it, that church was a
perpetual joy because it had three stained-glass windows with crimson
figures, black crimson like the darkest carnations in the big border, or
Gran’papa’s port, a crimson to make a small girl squirm with
inexplicable pleasure: And because she could sit there and plan out the
frescoes she would one day, when she was grown-up and an R.A., paint all
over the white-washed walls and up into the barred ceiling, being
conveyed thither nightly by the Archangel Raphael, who used to paint
pictures too, in Rome, before he was made a seraph, and so would
naturally be interested. The congregation, of course, were to be kept in
ignorance of the artist and a weekly increasing amazement until it was
finished. All but Justin. She would simply have to tell Justin....
That characteristic thought would be realized in characteristic fashion.
She was always dying to talk to him, and there was never any time; for
Justin even when not enclouded in a silence that might not be broken, a
silence which always made Laura, quite unnecessarily, feel rebuked, must
still be considered, at any rate in his twenties, to have enjoyed life
most in monologue. So Laura, obedient to the latest addition to her
Codex Justinianus, “Never worry him to talk,” evolved a system of
imaginary conversations which more or less satisfied her. She invented a
Justin of her own, a Justin identical in speech and manner and
appearance, a Justin who accompanied her wherever she went, into whose
sympathetic ear she poured, with a sort of passionate vivacity, every
thought and wish and fear and marvel of her developing mind.
It was curious to catch her unawares, to see her trotting down a garden
path, obviously absorbed in a discussion that required nods and laughter
and expressive hands, and little quick, questioning, upward glances,
while she endeavoured in vain to keep step with the long stride of an
Invisible.
Intercourse with this Invisible who to Laura was one with—was, indeed,
the real Justin, was so satisfying that when he arrived in the flesh for
his holidays, she was able to be satisfactory in her turn, to exist
demurely as no more than a domestic pet, with a trick of loosening his
tongue for him and the still more stimulating habit of listening in
intelligent admiration while it wagged.
She was quaintly accustomed, in the first half-hour of reunion, to a
sensation of depression, to be chilled, startled into faint, disloyal
protest—“But—but this isn’t Justin! I forgot he was like this.” And then
she would round indignantly upon herself—“Anyhow I like him this way.”
But in a day or two ideal and real would have more or less melted into
one again, obstinate discrepancies being explained away by Laura airily
enough—“It’s because I’m not grown-up.” Her child’s faith in that
panacea was almost as strong as her faith in Justin. Yet that last would
be sorely tried upon occasion. Their differences, when they occurred,
were catastrophic—very funny to watch. There is the old simile of the
Skye and the mastiff: or imagine, if you like, Bottom in the Bower, and
Titania nearly frantic with him for not _knowing_ (there’s the
trouble—she would not mind nearly so much if it were pure wickedness,
done a-purpose) but for not _knowing_ that he had just sat down so
heavily upon a spread of cowslips that there is little chance of a
single gold-coated pensioner being left alive when he gets up again. Not
that it is fair to compare Justin with Bottom. Justin, even in the
twenties, was not in the least egregious, only solid. He couldn’t help
it, could he, if he hadn’t any faults, or that his kindly tolerance of
her tantrums could drive Laura into nothing more or less than a fuming
replica of her Gran’papa’s canary? (You never realized how red Laura’s
hair was until you saw her in a passion.) But, in those encounters,
there was revealed a duality of temperament, a distinction in quality, a
difference in their grip of life, in the mere meaning, sometimes, that
they attached to the words they used, which made you marvel at the
attraction that they undoubtedly had for each other. For if Laura
enjoyed living in his pocket, Justin would have been equally
disconcerted if, one fine day, he had not found her there, like his
loose money, and his handkerchief, and his pencil-case, ready to his
hand. Yet, as I say, they sparred. There was a clash of claims
occasionally. It was not always easy to reconcile “what Mother used to
do” with “Justin says.”
There were the birds’ eggs, for instance, cause of the most serious of
their differences and the last, before she became a big girl and went
away to France to be finished, as Aunt Adela phrased it. Justin, as you
know, had the magpie instinct that as pleasantly infantizes the
ponderous male as a pink paper cap from a cracker the bald head of an
uncle at a Christmas dinner. He collected—as Brackenhurst, wisely
refusing to involve itself with the objective case, would explain to its
visitor behind a kid glove or a convenient Prayer Book—
“Yes—the Cloud pew—the only son. Oh, rolling! Oxford—intellectual, you
know——He collects.”
Brackenhurst was right: he did collect. Collect? He trawled. There were
no half-way measures. Interest him in a subject, from Cæsar’s wives to
Palæolithic Toothpicks, and he had no peace until he had pursued that
subject, netted it, stunned it with books of reference, stripped it of
its robe of mystery, taken it to pieces, turned it inside out. And
finally, when it was quite dead and done for, and its poor soul fled, he
would hang up the dry bones in triumph in his den and look round for
some one upon whom to discharge his accumulated information.
His mother was usually the sacrifice—his mother in her pretty parlour,
with Justin’s Progress running round the walls chronologically, from
‘Grace Darling’ and ‘Hope’ on the orange, to Burne-Jones, ‘Marriage à la
Mode,’ Post-Impressionism, and Japanese prints. She did not really mind,
though he scraped the wall-paper dreadfully shifting things each
holiday, and she couldn’t see why he should insist on moving ‘Wedded,’
into Cook’s bedroom, though Cook, of course, was very pleased. But
sometimes, especially in the Beardsley phase, she did wonder, uneasily,
if she were being over-educated.
Yet his changes of view did not disturb her as they disturbed Laura,
because, wise for all her simplicity, she could always trace them back,
as Laura could not, to the influence of the moment. He had so many
acquaintances whom he called friends, he, who had never yet felt the
need of a friend.
It was always the same. Damon collected stamps for a fortnight, and
Justin, Pythias of the hour, would go and do likewise, and be amazed, a
year later, to find that Damon showed no interest in the three albums he
had contrived to fill meanwhile, beyond merely and inaccurately
protesting that the beastly things always had bored him anyway. Justin
could not understand that. Through the school years, however, he had
naturally attracted his like and possessed, in consequence, a
heterogeneous treasury of coins, and cigarette pictures, and birds’
eggs, and butterflies, and walking sticks, and medals, all correctly
labelled and cased, and faithfully supervised by Laura, into whose
charge they had long ago been given, partly because he was genuinely
fond of his foundling and ready to humour her, partly because he had
been impressed, from the first, by her neat ways and dexterous
finger-tips. He admired neatness and precision as only a thoroughly
untidy man can, and Laura always knew where he had left his tobacco
pouch.
He seldom entirely outgrew his crazes, could always be fired anew by a
rummage. Cigarette pictures, certainly, had definitely ceased to charm
him, to the benefit of the twins (Laura, jealous-eyed, did not in the
least appreciate the compliment of being passed over) but he still
brought home an occasional carved stick, and his fourpenny bits and
George III pennies had one by one given up their pads of honour to quite
rare and beautiful coins. In fact, if he had not met Bellew——
And then it rained.
Justin yawned and fidgeted about the room, and settled down to a book
and shut it up again with a bang and sent it skating across the polished
table. He wanted to go out.... He had nothing to do.... Vacation was
rather a bore sometimes.... He wondered if he should get out his
stamps.... He hadn’t looked at his stamps lately.... Stamps were rather
a bore.... He yawned again.
“‘Rain, rain, go to Spain,’” chanted Laura, drumming on the glass. She
was kneeling on the window-seat, looking out at the wall of wet leafage
that faced her across the lawn, for the garden had been hung on the
breast of deep woods. Mrs. Cloud complained that the trees darkened the
house and made it damp, and Justin would offer to have them thinned, and
then Mrs. Cloud would talk hurriedly about central heating, and Justin
would laugh at her; because his mother had never yet been known to
sanction the destruction of an acorn. She had the characteristic passion
of a shy woman for trees—for the quiet, deep-rooted trees that shelter
and enclose.
“‘Rain, rain——’” began Laura again, energetically.
“Oh, stow it, Laura!” grunted Justin.
But the rain, either because, like any one else, it hates to hear its
name shouted after it, or because it had been at work since seven and it
was now close upon eleven o’clock, did suddenly slacken and waver in a
half-hearted and apologetic fashion that was most encouraging.
“It’s stopping! It’s going! You see in five minutes! I knew it would, or
the birds wouldn’t make such a row. Look at them on the lawn, Justin.”
She thrust her open palms out of the window to feel the weather. “It
_is_ stopping.”
“Oh, by the way, that reminds me,” Justin brightened. “Let’s have a look
at the birds’ eggs. Haven’t seen ’em for years.” And he took the key of
the fat little cabinet from a reluctant Laura. But he did not notice her
reluctance. “Ever heard of Bellew?”
“_British Feather Folk?_” Laura glanced up at a row of maroon volumes.
“Yes.” Then, as he wrenched at a stiff drawer: “I say, you can’t have
dusted here lately.”
She flushed.
“I just hate——” she was beginning, and then she checked herself. “What
about him, Justin?”
“Oh, I came across him last term. He was lecturing. I tell you, he’s a
man and a half. What he doesn’t know about birds would go into a wren’s
egg. We pal’d up, rather. He’s quite young. He’s made me as keen as
mustard. Of course I know nothing compared with him. He spends his life
at it.”
“Taking birds’ eggs?” enquired Laura frigidly. “Like a little boy?”
But he swept on unheeding. He had got his half-a-dozen sectioned trays
pulled out and spread round him on the floor.
“Not much here,” he commented disgustedly. “Sparrows and chaffinches and
robins. Bellew would hoot.” He laughed. “That’s the right word. He’s
like a bird himself, you know. All the birds that ever were, rolled into
one. Cocks his eye at you before he speaks and ruffles up his hair like
a parrot when he’s keen. I never knew such a man. They say South
Kensington would give its ears for his collection. And he can tell you
every blessed thing every blessed bird in England thinks, or says, or
does, from the egg on. You should hear him doing the notes. Hear that
blackbird in the wood? You can’t tell whether that squawk is temper, or
a worm gone down the wrong way, or a love affair. Nor can I. But if you
got hold of Bellew——”
Laura sniffed. She was sorry, but she did not like Mr. Bellew, and she
didn’t care who knew it.
“It’s squawking at Tom. He’s always under that nest. He got two of the
babies last year. And it’s not a blackbird, it’s a garden warbler. They
always build in that tree.”
“A garden warbler? How do you know?”
“_British Feather Folk._” Laura twinkled. And then—“Mother loved birds.”
He scanned his trays.
“What luck! I haven’t got a garden warbler. And it’s stopped raining.
Come on and show me the nest.”
“Justin, you’re not going to take the eggs?”
“Well, what do you think? I tell you I’m going in for it
again—seriously. Come on.”
She made no movement. He glanced up at her, surprised by her silence
into an observant glance.
“What’s up, Laura?”
She turned a distressed face to him.
“If you start—Wilfred and James will think they can too. And it’s been
so difficult to stop them.”
He laughed.
“If you think you can stop kids taking eggs——”
“But they haven’t. Not once. Mother hated it so. But if you start——”
“My good kid, where’s the harm? Birds can’t count.”
She flamed up at him in her sudden way.
“Harm? How would you like having your insides blown out before you’d
ever been born?”
He chuckled and took up his cap.
“Oh, rot! Come on!”
She shook her head.
“Oh, all right then!” and he ran downstairs whistling.
She sat on the window-seat, her leg tucked under her and watched him
swing across the lawn and dive into the wood, and still sat there,
twiddling the latch and thinking things out. After all, did it
matter?... Birds had so many children.... Birds couldn’t count.... If
Justin began collecting eggs again he would be in the woods all day....
Would it—could it matter just going with him?... If one didn’t take eggs
oneself?...
But the facts were too clear for her. Birds-nesting was cruel.... Mother
never let you.... There was nothing—nothing to be done....
Justin had been gone ages.... She supposed he would be out all the
morning now.... He had left the room in a most dreadfully untidy
state.... Oh, well!
She set to work.
It was in a very damp heap, on a very tidy floor, that half an hour
later a tactless maid discovered her. But Laura, scrambling to her feet,
forestalled all comment.
“I happen,” said Laura, with great dignity, “to have a little bit of a
cold. It’s lunch-time, isn’t it? Good-bye, Mary. I’m going home now.”
And home she went.
Her guardian angel was very much pleased with her. But the devil, who
happened to be passing, though he offered his congratulations, opined
that it would be worth his while to come back that way in a year or two.
------------------------------------------------------------------------