Dodo made her feel uncomfortably old. She felt Dodo's extravagantly high spirits were a sort of milestone to show, how far she herself had travelled from youth. It was impossible to conceive of Dodo ever getting middle-aged or elderly. She had racked her brains in vain to try to think of any woman of her own age who could possibly ever have been as insolently young as Dodo. She had the habit, as I have mentioned before, of making strangely direct remarks, and she turned to Dodo and said:—
"I should so like to see you ten years hence. I wonder if people like you ever grow old."
"I shall never grow old," declared Dodo confidently. "Something, I feel sure, will happen to prevent that. I shall stop young till I go out like a candle, or am carried off in a whirlwind or something. I couldn't be old; it isn't in me. I shall go on talking nonsense till the end of my life, and I can't talk nonsense if I have to sit by the fire and keep a shawl over my mouth, which I shall have to do if I get old. Wherefore I never shall. It's a great relief to be certain of that. I used to bother my head about it at one time! and it suddenly flashed upon me, about ten days ago, that I needn't bother about it any more, as I never should be old."
"Would you dislike having to be serious very much?" asked Edith.
"It isn't that I should dislike it," said Dodo; "I simply am incapable of it. I was serious last night for at least an hour, and a feverish reaction has set in. I couldn't be serious for a week together, if I was going to be beheaded the next moment, all the time. I daresay it would be very nice to be serious, just as I'm sure it would be very nice to live at the bottom of the sea and pull the fishes' tails, but it isn't possible."
Dodo had quite forgotten that she had intended to go for a ride, and she went into the garden with Nora, and played ducks and drakes on the pond, and punted herself about, and gathered water-lilies. Then she was seized with an irresistible desire to fish, and caught a large pike, which refused to be killed, and Dodo had to fetch the gardener to slay it. She then talked an astonishing amount of perfect nonsense, and thought that it must be lunch-time. Accordingly, she went back to the house, and was found by Edith, a quarter of an hour later, playing hide-and-seek with the coachman's children, whom she had lured in from the stable-yard as she went by. The rules were that the searchers were to catch the hiders, and Dodo had entrenched herself behind the piano, and erected an impregnable barricade, consisting of a revolving bookcase and the music-stool. The two seekers entirely declined to consider that she had won, and Dodo, with a show of reason, was telling them that they hadn't caught her yet at any rate. The situation seemed to admit of no compromise and no solution, unless, as Dodo suggested, they got a pound or two of blasting powder and destroyed her defences. However, a deus ex machina appeared in the person of the coachman himself, who had come in for orders, and hinted darkly that maternal vengeance was brewing if certain persons did not wash their hands in time for dinner, which was imminent.
"There's a telegram for you somewhere," said Edith to Dodo, as she emerged hot and victorious. "I sent a man out into the garden with it. The messenger is waiting for an answer."
Dodo became suddenly grave.
"I suppose he's gone to the pond," she said; "that's where I was seen last. I'll go and get it."
She met the man walking back to the house, having looked for her in vain. She took the telegram and opened it. It had been forwarded from her London house. It was very short.