Great Uncle Hoot-Toot

E-text prepared by Delphine Lettau, Paul Dring, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
... what we have we prize not to the worth Whiles we enjoy it; but being lack'd and lost, Why then we rack the value. — Much Ado about Nothing.
hat's Geoff, I'm sure, said Elsa; I always know his ring. I do hope—— and she stopped and sighed a little.
What? said Frances, looking up quickly.
Oh, nothing particular. Run down, Vic, dear, and get Geoff to go straight into the school-room. Order his tea at once. I don't want him to come upstairs just now. Mamma is so busy and worried with those letters.
Vic, a little girl of nine, with long fair hair and long black legs, and a pretty face with a bright, eager expression, needed no second bidding. She was off almost before Elsa had finished speaking.
What a good child she is! said Frances. What a clever, nice boy she would have made! And if Geoff had been a girl, perhaps he would have been more easily managed.
I don't know, said Elsa. Perhaps if Vicky had been a boy she would have been spoilt and selfish too.
Elsa, said Frances, I think you are rather hard upon Geoff. He is like all boys. Everybody says they are more selfish than girls, and then they grow out of it.
They grow out of showing it so plainly, perhaps, replied Elsa, rather bitterly. But you contradict yourself, Frances. Just a moment ago you said what a much nicer boy Vic would have made. All boys aren't like Geoff. Of course, I don't mean that he is really a bad boy; but it just comes over me now and then that it is a shame he should be such a tease and worry, boy or not. When mamma is anxious, and with good reason, and we girls are doing all we can, why should Geoff be the one we have to keep away from her, and to smooth down, as it were? It's all for her sake, of course; but it makes me ashamed, all the same, to feel that we are really almost afraid of him. There now—— And she started up as the sound of a door, slammed violently in the lower regions, reached her ears.