Mary always hoped that Uncle Victor would notice her and say, “Mary is reading Locke On the Human Understanding,” or that Mr. Propart would come and turn over the books and make some interesting remark. But they never did.
At half-past eight Catty would bring in the tea-tray; the white and grey and gold teacups would be set out round the bulging silver teapot that lifted up its spout with a foolish, pompous expression, like a hen. Mamma would move about the table in her mauve silk gown, and there would be a scent of cream and strong tea. Every now and then the shimmering silk and the rich scent would come between her and the grey, tight-pressed, difficult page.
“ ‘The senses at first let in particular ideas and furnish the yet empty cabinet: and the mind growing by degrees familiar with some of them, they are lodged in the memory and names got to them.’
“Then how—Then how?—”
The thought she thought was coming wouldn’t come, and Mamma was telling her to get up and hand round the bread and butter.
II
“Mr. Ponsonby, do you remember your innate ideas?”
“My how much?” said Mr. Ponsonby.
“The ideas you had before you were born?”
Mr. Ponsonby said, “Before I was born? Well—” He really seemed to be considering it.
Mamma’s chair, pushed further along the hearthrug, had driven her back and back, till the box was hidden behind the curtain.
Mr. Ponsonby was Mark’s friend. Mark was at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich now. Every Saturday Mr. Ponsonby came home with Mark and stayed till Sunday evening. You knew that sooner or later he would find you out behind Mamma’s chair.
“I mean,” she said, “the ideas you were born with.”
“Seems to me,” said Mr. Ponsonby, “I was born with precious few. Anyhow I can’t say I remember them.”
“I was afraid you’d say that. It’s what Mr. Locke says.”
“Mr. how much?”
“Mr. Locke. You can look at him if you like.”
She thought: “He won’t. He won’t. They never, never do.”
But Mr. Ponsonby did. He looked at Mr. Locke, and he looked at Mary, and he said, “By Gum!” He even read the bits about the baby and the empty cabinet.
“You don’t mean to say you like this sort of thing?”
“I like it most awfully. Of course I don’t mean as much as brook-jumping, but almost as much.”
And Mr. Ponsonby said, “Well—I must say—of all—you are—by Gum!”
He made it sound like the most delicious praise.
Mr. Ponsonby was taller and older than Mark. He was nineteen. She thought he was the nicest looking person she had ever seen.
His face was the colour of thick white honey; his hair was very dark, and he had long blue eyes and long black eyebrows like bars, drawn close down on to the blue. His nose would have been hooky if it hadn’t been so straight, and his mouth was quiet and serious. When he talked to you his mouth and eyes looked as if they liked it.
Mark came and said, “Minky, if you stodge like that you’ll get all flabby.”
It wasn’t nice of Mark to say that before Mr. Ponsonby, when he knew perfectly well that she could jump her own height.
“Me flabby? Feel my muscle.”
It rose up hard under her soft skin.
“Feel it, Mr. Ponsonby.”
“I say—what a biceps!”
“Yes, but,” Mark said, “you should feel his.”
His was even bigger and harder than Mark’s. “Mine,” she said sorrowfully, “will never be as good as his.”
Then Mamma came and told her it was bedtime, and Mr. Ponsonby said, “Oh, Mrs. Olivier, not yet.”
“Five minutes more, then.”
But the five minutes were never any good. You just sat counting them.
And when it was all over and Mr. Ponsonby strode across the drawing-room and opened the door for her she went laughing; she stood in the doorway and laughed. When you were sent to bed at nine the only dignified thing was to pretend you didn’t care.
And Mr. Ponsonby, holding the door so that Mamma couldn’t see him, looked at her and shook his head, as much as to say, “You and I know it isn’t a joke for either of us, this unrighteous banishment.”
III
“What on earth are you doing?”
She might have known that some day Mamma would come up and find her putting the children to bed.
She had seven. There was Isabel Batty, and Mrs. Farmer’s red-haired baby, and Mark in the blue frock in the picture when he was four, and Dank in his white frock and blue sash, and the three very little babies you made up out of your head. Six o’clock was their bedtime.
“You’d no business to touch those baby-clothes,” Mamma said.
The baby-clothes were real. Every evening she took them from the drawer in the linen cupboard; and when she had sung the children to sleep she shook out the little frocks and petticoats and folded them in a neat pile at the foot of the bed.
“I thought you were in the schoolroom learning your lessons?”
“So I was, Mamma. But—you know—six o’clock is their bedtime.”
“Oh Mary! you told me you’d given up that silly game.”
“So I did. But they won’t let me. They don’t want me to give them up.”
Mamma sat down, as if it was too much for her.
“I hope,” she said, “you don’t talk to Catty or anybody about it.”
“No, Mamma. I couldn’t. They’re my secret.”
“That was all very
