“This visit is a high solemnity. My aunt counts on it year after year. She turns the house upside down for us; she invites our special friends—she scarcely knows Frieda, and we can’t leave her on her hands. I missed one day, and she would be so hurt if I didn’t stay the full ten.”
“But I’ll say a word to her. Don’t you bother.”
“Henry, I won’t go. Don’t bully me.”
“You want to see the house, though?”
“Very much—I’ve heard so much about it, one way or the other. Aren’t there pigs’ teeth in the wych-elm?”
“Pigs’ teeth?”
“And you chew the bark for toothache.”
“What a rum notion! Of course not!”
“Perhaps I have confused it with some other tree. There are still a great number of sacred trees in England, it seems.”
But he left her to intercept Mrs. Munt, whose voice could be heard in the distance: to be intercepted himself by Helen.