“My dear, since you are so anxious to be helpful I shall let you finish your dress yourself. The material is cut, and the lining basted. I will give whatever directions you may need, but dressmaking is not nearly so difficult an art as the construction of flying-machines. Besides, if you are busy with your needle, I shall not worry about you.”
Poor Ernie! her face was a study. She simply hates sewing. “It makes her toes prick,” she says. Also, it will mean giving up all her playtime for weeks to come, and she must be careful and not botch, since she will have to wear the result of her labours.
On the whole, I think her punishment was even more severe than Geoffrey’s. But neither of the culprits complains. Rather they glide about the house in such a beatific state of Christian humility that one knows it cannot last.
“I don’t believe in hitting a fellow when he’s down,” remarked Haze to me this evening. “But I’m glad they realise what they’ve done. Apart from the frightful publicity of the thing, I miss the flying-machine. There is nothing to keep the draughts off my head at night, and the workshop is not what it was!”
Thursday, December 11.
This afternoon mother called on Mrs. Burroughs. She is the lady whose house Ernie broke into with the flying-machine, and I forgot to say how lovely she was about it. “Surprised, of course,” as Ernie admitted, “but so pleasant.”
Mother intended calling yesterday, to arrange about the broken glass, etc.,—for which, fortunately, Uncle George said he would pay,—but she was flat, poor dear, with a nervous headache, and so had to put it off. Ernie was rather shaken, too, and Robin quite excited and feverish.
As he continued to have a little “temperature” this morning, I did not give him his reading lesson till afternoon. He is really getting on very nicely, when one considers the disadvantages against which he has to fight;—not only his ill health, but he has had so many stories read to him, and is so far advanced for his age in other ways, that it is hard for him to read:—“I see a Cat. Does the Cat see me?” If he did not wish to crush Georgie’s rising conceit, I think we would have a struggle teaching him.
He said to me to-day when the lesson was over,—“Oh, Ellie, I do hate cats,—all but Rosebud!” and sighed prodigiously. It is amusing to hear Robin sigh. He is such a little boy, and the sigh is so very big. I told him he would make an invaluable passenger aboard a sailing vessel, for, if the wind died down, it would only be necessary for him to sigh once or twice to blow the ship right into port.
This idea tickled him mightily, and he sighed again even louder than before, and then he said he would tell me a story. I love Bobsie’s stories,—they are so original. Here is the one he told this afternoon: