Then he said to me: "Are you in a finished state under Miss Daisy Dolman?" and when Oswald said, "Yes," the Editor helped him to take off all the womanly accoutrements, and to do them up in brown paper. And he lent him a cap to go home in.
I never saw a man laugh more. He is an excellent sort.
But no slow passage of years, however many, can ever weaken Oswald's memory of what those petticoats were like to walk in, and how ripping it was to get out of them, and have your own natural legs again.
We parted from that Editor without a strain on anybody's character.
He must have written to Albert's uncle, and told him all, for we got a letter next week. It said—
"My dear Kiddies,—Art cannot be forced. Nor can Fame. May I beg you for the future to confine your exertions to blowing my trumpet—or Fame's—with your natural voices? Editors may be led, but they won't be druv. The Right Honourable Miss Etheltruda Bustler seems to have aroused a deep pity for me in my Editor's heart. Let that suffice. And for the future permit me, as firmly as affectionately, to reiterate the assurance and the advice which I have so often breathed in your long young ears, 'I am not ungrateful; but I do wish you would mind your own business.'"
"That's just because we were found out," said Alice. "If we'd succeeded he'd have been sitting on the top of the pinnacle of Fame, and he would have owed it all to us. That would have been making him something like a wedding present."
What we had really done was to make something very like——but the author is sure he has said enough.