"Lovely!" said Jack.
Dodo looked up from Grantie's letter, and ran her eyes round the walls.
"But those two pictures there are by Franz Hals," she said. "Do let us sell one, and then we shall have eight thousand pounds. You shall have the eight, darling, because the picture is yours, and I shall have the thousands because I thought of it."
Jack gave a short grunt as he turned over his paper. He had not quite got over the attack of the morning microbe, to which males are chiefly subject.
"All right," he said. "And what shall we buy with the eight thousand pounds? Some more boots or bacon?"
Dodo considered this oracular utterance.
"That's a wonderfully sensible question," she said. "I don't really know what we should buy with it. I suppose we shouldn't buy anything, and the picture would be gone. I would certainly rather have it than nothing! What a mine of wisdom you are! I suppose it was my mercantile blood that made me think of selling a picture. Blood's thicker than paint.... It always shows through."
A fatal brown spot had appeared in the middle of Jack's paper just opposite the spirit-lamp of the tea-kettle against which it leaned. As he was considering this odd phenomenon, it spread and burst into flame.
"Fire!" cried Dodo, "Edith will be burned in her bed. Put—put a rug round it! Lie down on it, Jack! Turn the hot water on to it! Put some sand on it! Why aren't we at the seaside?"
Jack did none of these brilliant manœuvres. In an extraordinarily prosaic manner he took the paper up, dropped it into the grate and stamped on it. But the need for prompt action had started his drowsy mechanisms.