But why? Her Cœlestial City hardly needed a nursemaid’s recognition?
Oh, I see. I see what you mean. But then you are arguing as a ‘grown-up.’ We grown-ups, of course, believe or disbelieve—black or white—one thing or the other—and there’s an end of it. But this is a child. A child can reconcile—look back, Collaborator—implicit belief and frank scepticism in a way that, to us, is all but incomprehensible. A child will show you a fairy ring without dreaming that it can be anything but the track of elfin feet, yet will instantly and vigorously denounce as a story-teller the contemporary who claims to have seen the Little People at their dancing. Fantasy and Common Sense sit see-saw in those early years, and keep a wonderful balance; but when the lanky ‘teens add their weight it is generally Common Sense that comes to earth with a thud, while poor Fantasy is jerked sky high and lost for good among the stars: which is a pity.
Do you understand now why Laura—who will always keep that balance, I believe, however old she grows—could, with only the Kent hills between her and heaven, be yet distinctly relieved that Nurse’s mother had been there before her, and that children were half price? Fantasy, you see, like a fairy sixpence, had been rung upon the counter of Nurse’s mother’s experiences and pronounced coin of the realm.
Laura—but I wish you wouldn’t interrupt, Collaborator! I lose the thread. You shall censor it all afterwards, but first let me talk myself out. And it is not polite to murmur “Impossible” pointedly to your pointed knitting needles!
But Laura, all this while, has sat meekly between the twins, eating her biscuits, a good little grubby-handed girl.
She was always good when she was left alone, as the new nurse had at last discovered; so when the biscuits had been eaten and the children dismissed to another hour’s play before going home, it was with the twins that Nurse’s paperback shared her attention, rather than with Laura, slipping away so quietly that her little thin dark body and red-brown head wavering in and out of the big trunks was scarcely to be distinguished from a slim beech sapling a-sway in the wind. Nurse would have settled down to her reading with less composure if she could have seen beyond the screen of trees, have caught Laura’s backward glances, half scared, half triumphant, as she gained the open hill-top, and her odd proceedings when she decided that she was out of every one’s inquisitive sight.
For Laura, the careless, the untidy, the hard-on-her-clothes, swayed, I suppose, by some broken memory of kind hands pinching up her ribbons and smoothing her curls, of eyes very proud and critical of their Laura, was first and fastidiously concerned with her appearance. She rubbed her hands as clean as she could on the grass, fastened a careless button, pulled up her stockings and adjusted her suspenders. Mother hated wrinkly stockings.... She tightened her hair ribbon, straining her hair off her face till her eyes nearly jumped out of her head, and did her best to brush the long locks, that the wind had whipped into rats’-tails, round and round her finger into the sausages that grown-ups desire. She took off her shoes and shook out the sand and bits of leaf, and tied them in the complicated tangle that Laura believed to be a ‘Louise’ knot, because it never under any circumstances came undone. Indeed, it needed scissors in the evening. Finally she took out her purse, poured the hoard into her lap and counted it breathlessly. A penny, three halfpennies, two farthings, and the threepenny bit that she had had given her to put in the plate on that fortunate Sunday when there had not, after all, been a collection. Sixpence exactly. Children were half price, so sixpence exactly could smuggle you through gates of pearl into your mother’s lap.
She took a last look at the patch-work country, noted once again the lie of the road through the valley below, and then, with a little gasp like a bather taking the plunge, took to her heels and ran down the hill-side.