She went out and she did get earache. Lily had always known that she would.
Yet Lily, from that day added to her store of small, perverted convictions, the unescapable conclusion that it was very naughty to foresee calamity, and still naughtier to voice that foresight.
She still sometimes said to the nurse, or to the daily governess: "Vonnie's got a cold already. She'll have earache if she goes out to-day." The words seemed forced from her in a frail hope that would not be denied, that the catastrophe might be averted.
But the nurse simply said: "Will you learn to mind your own business, Miss Lily? I should hope I know what was good for Miss Vonnie by this time, without any interference from you."
And the governess said bracingly: "Oh, I don't think Vonnie's got much of a cold, have you, dear?"
To which Vonnie, of course, said No, just as she would have said there was nothing the matter, if earache had actually been upon her.
"There, you see, Lily! You really must give up always trying to speak for Vonnie instead of letting her speak for herself. It's not good for her, and it's not good for you. What will you do when you're both grown up?" said Miss Cleeve humorously, "if you're at a ball, let us say, and some gentleman asks Vonnie to dance, and then you, Lily, answer instead of her and say 'Oh no, thank you very much, she's tired.' Wouldn't that make you both look very silly, don't you think?"
Lily was no match for Miss Cleeve's ridicule. She could think of no confutation of this reductio ad absurdum of the situation, even in her own mind. She merely hated Miss Cleeve vehemently, and put her for ever into the large class of people who "didn't understand."
These were indeed legion, where was concerned the most vital preoccupation of Lily's whole being—Vonnie's welfare.
When an earache pain had actually begun, which it did almost always in the evening, not the day-time—and Lily knew by the look on Vonnie's face that it was still quite endurable, there was a faint hope that if she went to bed quickly and pulled the blankets over her head, she might go to sleep before it became really bad.