The children did not know the meaning of rudimentary, but it sounded a rude, insulting word.
“I don’t see that we did any harm,” said Cyril sulkily.
“Oh, no,” said the Psammead with withering irony, “not at all! Of course not! Quite the contrary! Exactly so! Only she happened to wish that she might soon find herself in your country. And soon may mean any moment.”
“Then it’s your fault,” said Robert, “because you might just as well have made ‘soon’ mean some moment next year or next century.”
“That’s where you, as so often happens, make the mistake,” rejoined the Sand-fairy. “I couldn’t mean anything but what she meant by ‘soon’. It wasn’t my wish. And what she meant was the next time the King happens to go out lion hunting. So she’ll have a whole day, and perhaps two, to do as she wishes with. She doesn’t know about time only being a mode of thought.”
“Well,” said Cyril, with a sigh of resignation, “we must do what we can to give her a good time. She was jolly decent to us. I say, suppose we were to go to St James’s Park after dinner and feed those ducks that we never did feed. After all that Babylon and all those years ago, I feel as if I should like to see something real, and now. You’ll come, Psammead?”
“Where’s my priceless woven basket of sacred rushes?” asked the Psammead morosely. “I can’t go out with nothing on. And I won’t, what’s more.”
And then everybody remembered with pain that the bass bag had, in the hurry of departure from Babylon, not been remembered.
“But it’s not so extra precious,” said Robert hastily. “You can get them given to you for nothing if you buy fish in Farringdon Market.”
“Oh,” said the Psammead very crossly indeed, “so you presume on my sublime indifference to the things of this disgusting modern world, to fob me off with a travelling equipage that costs you nothing. Very well, I shall go to sand. Please don’t wake me.”