At this moment Uncle Eneas came blustering into the room.
"I've had a letter from Uncle Matthew," he proclaimed. "He's got an idea into his head that he wants to go down to the seaside. Some fool of a doctor's been stuffing him up with that notion. He says he thinks we ought to go to the seaside, and says it would be a good idea to share expenses, we paying two-thirds and he paying one-third. The mean old screw! How like him that is! And if we take baby he'll only want to pay a quarter."
"Oh, but I think Uncle Matthew would be too frightening for dear baby," said Aunt Cuckoo. "Why shouldn't Jasmine go and stay with him?" she suggested.
"That wouldn't suit his plan," said Uncle Eneas. "If Jasmine went he would have to pay for her as well as for himself."
"But don't you think that if Jasmine went to stay with him at Muswell Hill, she would do as well as a change of air?"
"By Jove, that's quite a notion," said Uncle Eneas, looking at his niece as people look at the sky to see if it is going to rain. Jasmine was trying to remember what she knew about Uncle Matthew. He existed in her mind as an incredibly old gentleman of boundless wealth who years ago had bought a picture of her father.
"I think you would like Uncle Matthew so much," Aunt Cuckoo was saying persuasively. "Of course he's very old and he's a little eccentric. I think old people often are eccentric, don't you? But he's very well off, and it really does seem a wonderful solution of the difficulty."
"You mean the difficulty of having me on your hands?" Jasmine bluntly demanded.
"Please don't say that," Aunt Cuckoo begged. "Surely you heard what your uncle said? Our difficulty is that we don't want to disturb Uncle Matthew with precious Baboose. I don't think he would quite understand how the little pet came to us."
So long as she was to be tossed about like a ball, Jasmine thought she might just as well be tossed into an old gentleman's lap as anywhere else, and soon after this, gathering from a fragment she overheard of a low colloquy between her uncle and aunt that her introduction to Uncle Matthew would intensely annoy the Hector Grants, she made up her mind not to oppose, but even to press forward the proposed visit.