When, for instance, Gran’papa’s grudging and suspicious recognition of those hot-bloods Mr. Tennyson and Mr. Dickens, was compared in her alert mind with Justin’s yawning admission that he really must wade through ’em all some day, she would give a little gurgle of laughter all to herself, though she did not really know why. But she was sure her mother would have laughed too in that half-forgotten fascinating way of hers and have made the funniness obvious to Laura. Laura was sure of that. Even Sam Weller was not quite so funny when you met him by yourself—but when Mother had read it aloud—oh, did the twins remember? But the twins never remembered anything. Never remembered, never cared for anything but trains, and rigging up telephones in the cherry trees, and catapulting robins, never wanted Laura except at night when there were stories to be told, or when they quarrelled with each other in the day-time. And certainly never noticed much difference between the edition of Alice that Gran’papa produced from a corner of his bookshelf one birthday and the parcel from Justin by the post, with the same familiar letterpress and most unfamiliar drawings by a certain sacrilegious Mr. Rackham. There again Gran’papa’s indignation, though she agreed with him, struck her as humorous. In short, she was beginning, what with one mentor and the other, to form a judgment of her own, not to mention a morality. The fundamental ‘shalt nots,’ built up secretly, like coral rocks, in her childish deeps, were, in the lull that precedes the teens, beginning to show starkly above water.
“Never, never cry.
“It’s nice to be in the right, but it makes them squash you.
“Never argue with Gran’papa.
“Never remind Justin of what he said last holidays.
“Never say you’re tired.”
In matters of art, too, though she enjoyed trying to look through both ends of her human opera-glasses at once, she had got into a habit (in self-defence, as if it were) of using her own eyes in daily life. Glasses were a revelation, of course, either end of them. Justin’s display of remote, romantic figures with curvy throats who really lived, in London, and waved Yellow Books (a horrid colour) and sniffed at Gran’papa’s Michael Angelo because he had a broken nose and couldn’t sniff back, was as exciting as it was bewildering; but Gran’papa’s method of magnifying, clarifying the old-fashioned deities of an art dictionary into solid, satisfactory men and women, had also its charm for her. And the woman in her, that must dislike change of any kind, found Gran’papa the more dependable. Justin had such different interests each holidays (he left delicious books behind him when he went back to college) that it was difficult to keep up; but Gran’papa would, on any given evening, be found reading the Noctes Ambrosianae with the same absorption as on any previous evening of all Laura’s years: Gran’papa could be trusted to say—“Pretty enough, pretty enough—but what about feet? Hands and feet, my dear, hands and feet, if you want to learn to draw,” when he was shown the latest ‘head’ (there were half a dozen battered casts for the borrowing—Cæsar, Clytie, Antinous—in the village schools) upon which Laura had spent herself and her time and her beautiful fourpenny indiarubber.
Yes—Gran’papa was dependable. He damped her, but she was already intelligent enough to enjoy the tingle of his cold water, and, always protesting, to know him in the right. Yet how she grudged him his rightness! At twelve years old there is not much charm in a plaster cast of a foot or in a muscular gentleman with his skin off, when Clytie, half enchanted, smiles from her petals, and you have made up your mind to do the most beautiful copy of her that the world has ever seen by lunch-time, only coloured, pale pink Clytie and orange sunflower, and send it in to the Academy and get made an R.A. like Angelica Kaufmann, who wasn’t even English, as a little surprise for Justin.
She was always, in secret, fantastically ambitious, but her R.A. was one cobweb with her Helen of Troyship (you should have seen Laura going straight to headquarters—Olympus—and talking out the whole wretched business with Zeus) or with the regency she undertook after delivering up Elizabeth (in chains) to Mary Queen of Scots, reinstated and regal and happily converted to Protestantism entirely through Laura’s indefatigable personal exertions. For Laura, to Aunt Adela’s edified relief, was whole-heartedly Anglican, in spite of having to learn collects. She did not explain, if she knew it, that church was a perpetual joy because it had three stained-glass windows with crimson figures, black crimson like the darkest carnations in the big border, or Gran’papa’s port, a crimson to make a small girl squirm with inexplicable pleasure: And because she could sit there and plan out the frescoes she would one day, when she was grown-up and an R.A., paint all over the white-washed walls and up into the barred ceiling, being conveyed thither nightly by the Archangel Raphael, who used to paint pictures too, in Rome, before he was made a seraph, and so would naturally be interested. The congregation, of course, were to be kept in ignorance of the artist and a weekly increasing amazement until it was finished. All but Justin. She would simply have to tell Justin....
That characteristic thought would be realized in characteristic fashion. She was always dying to talk to him, and there was never any time; for Justin even when not enclouded in a silence that might not be broken, a silence which always made Laura, quite unnecessarily, feel rebuked, must still be considered, at any rate in his twenties, to have enjoyed life most in monologue. So Laura, obedient to the latest addition to her Codex Justinianus, “Never worry him to talk,” evolved a system of imaginary conversations which more or less satisfied her. She invented a Justin of her own, a Justin identical in speech and manner and appearance, a Justin who accompanied her wherever she went, into whose sympathetic ear she poured, with a sort of passionate vivacity, every thought and wish and fear and marvel of her developing mind.