“I can’t say any more,” said Georgie, rather nettled. “And there’s the leather-jacket grub I see has begun on yours. I daresay there won’t be a blade of grass left presently.”
Robert changed the conversation: there were bare patches. “The Museum insurance,” he said. “I got the fire-policy this morning. The contents are the property of the four trustees, me and you and Daisy and Mrs. Boucher. The building is Colonel Boucher’s, and that’s insured separately. If you had a spark of enterprise about you, you would take a match, set light to the mittens, and hope for the best.”
“You’re very tarsome and cross,” said Georgie. “I should like to take a match and set light to you.”
Georgie hated rude conversations like this, but when Robert was in such a mood, it was best to be playful. He did not mean, in any case, to cease leaning over the garden paling till Daisy came back from her trunk-call.
“Beyond the mittens,” began Robert, “and, of course, those three sketches of yours, which I daresay are masterpieces——”
Daisy bowled out of the dining-room and came with such speed down the steps that she nearly fell into the circular bed where the broccoli had been. (The mignonette there was poorish.)
“At half-past one or two,” said she, bursting with the news and at the same time unable to suppress her gift for withering sarcasm. “Lunch to-morrow. Just a picnic, you know, as soon as she happens to arrive. So kind of her. More notice than she took of me last time.”
“Lucia?” asked Georgie.
“Yes. Let me see, I was putting, wasn’t I?”
“If you call it putting,” said Robert. He was not often two up and he made the most of it.