'Yes, but it buttons down the front, that's where the difference is.'
'Do you always button it, then, when you put it on?'
'Oh, always,' I replied, 'don't people usually?'
'I dunno,' he said, 'only this morning she had got hers sort of draped across her tummy, kept together with the belt knotted. When you walk about the passages in hotels, Meg, don't you wear a cap or something?'
'My dear child,' I observed, 'where do you think I was dragged up?'
CHAPTER VII
Fairy hands have been at work. Instead of a shining white world all is green again. There has been a very rapid thaw. The frost has gone and little brooks of melted snow are running down the lanes and paths. Tiny green spikes have appeared in all the garden as if by magic. There is even a half-drowned primrose out, telling that spring is coming very soon this year.
The morning post brought me a letter from Michael 'written in the mud.' It contains a most amazing suggestion. He asks me to try to find an old house 'such as his soul loveth' and make a home.
Oh, how he must have misunderstood my letters and thought because I frivolled and told him all our stupid jokes that I am happy. How can he imagine I could even contemplate making a home in England without him when it has been the dream of our lives to do it together. Surely he knows by now that 'Home' for me is just that particular bit of mud in Flanders in which his dear feet are embedded, and that any place without him is exile, that life, till he returns, is merely marking time. I don't care if I am talking like a little Bethel.... Ross thinks it's a topping idea. Even Nannie didn't help me. When I told her, all she said was, 'But of course you will if Master Michael wants you to.'
I felt, as I sometimes used to as a child, that 'every one's against me,' and I decided to walk my devils off.