‘Yes?’ says Susan, seeing the child pause, and trying to help him. ‘The goat?’
‘The goat an’ the witch—’ Long pause here, and plain incapacity to proceed. Tommy has evidently come face to face with a cul de sac.
‘Hole in the ballad,’ says Dominick to Betty in a low tone.
‘Go on, Tommy,’ says Susan encouragingly. Really, Tommy’s story is so presentable this time that she quite likes to give him a lift, as it were.
‘Well, the witch fell down,’ says Tommy, goaded to endeavour, ‘an’ the goat sat on her.’
‘Not on her,’ says Susan, with dainty protest. ‘You know you frightened me once, Tommy, but now—’
‘Yes, they did, Susan—they did.’ In his excitement he has duplicated the enemy. ‘They all sat down on her—every one of them, twenty of them.’
‘But, Tommy, you said there was only one goat.’
This is rash of Susan.
‘I don’t care,’ cries Tommy, who is of a liberal disposition. ‘There was twenty of them. An’ they all sat down on her, first on her stomach, an’’—solemnly turning himself and clasping both his fat hands over the seat of his small breeches—‘an’ then on her here.’ He lifts his hands and smacks them down again. He indeed most graphically illustrates his ‘here.’