“Once upon a time,” he said, “there were three absurd old men, who lived together in an enormous castle built of strawberries.”
“I should have ate them!” said Jim.
“They did. When they felt the least hungry, and very often when they didn’t, they ate a piece of the wall, which instantly grew again. Sometimes they forgot, and ate the chairs on which they were sitting. Because the chairs never grew again, and so after a year or two they all had to sit on the floor.”
He paused, for to talk pure nonsense requires an effort of the imagination. It is fatal if any sense creeps in. In the pause Daisy brushed away the last remnants of hay from his face, because she thought she would hear better so. The face was very red and hot and extraordinarily young—the face of a man, it is true, but of a very boyish person.
“Oh, get on!” said Jim.
Hugh again gave an involuntary grunt.
“They were all, all three of them, very absurd people,” he said, “chiefly because they had never had any mothers, but had been found in gooseberry-bushes in the garden.”
Daisy gave a long appreciative sigh.
“Oh, were you found there, Hughie?” she said.
Hugh thought a moment.