‘Oh, very well,’ said Charles; ‘only don’t forget I told you it was silly rot. And of course nothing will happen. I was right about the Latin, you know.’
‘Here’s your dressing-gown,’ said Charlotte, who had been feeling for it in the mahogany wardrobe. ‘You can scrabble for your shoes with your feet; I suppose they’re beside the bed. Hurry up.’
Charles got up, grumbling gently. It was not to be expected that he would feel the same about this wild fern-seed idea as his sisters, who had thought and talked of nothing else for more than three hours, and had had to pinch each other to keep awake. Still, he got up, and they all went down to Mrs. Wilmington’s room, which was warm and seemed full of antimacassars, china ornaments, and cheerfully-bound copies of the poets—the kind that are given for birthday presents and prizes, beautiful outside, and inside very small print on thin paper that lets the printing on the other side show through. Charlotte found this out as they waited, by the light of their one candle, for it to be twelve o’clock.
Caroline was plucking fronds of fern, carefully, so that the lack of them should not disfigure the plants.
‘It’s all duffing,’ said Charles. ‘Don’t forget I said so. And how are you going to pound the beastly stuff? You’ll wake the Wilmington and the Uncle and the whole lot if you pound.’
‘I thought,’ said Caroline, hesitating with the fern-fronds in her hand, and her little short pig-tail sticking out like a saucepan handle, as Charles put it later, ‘I thought—it sounds rather nasty, but it isn’t really, you know, if you remember it’s all you—I thought we might chew them. Each do our own, you know, and put them on our eyes like a poultice. I know you hated it when Aunt Emmeline chewed the lily leaves and put them on your thumb when you burnt it,’ she told Charles, ‘but then her chewing is quite different from you doing it.’
‘I don’t care,’ said Charles; ‘it’s only a bit more of your nonsense. Give us the beastly seeds.’
‘They won’t come off the leaves,’ said Caroline. ‘We shall have to chew the lot.’
‘In for a penny, in for a sheep,’ said Charlotte cheerfully. ‘I mean we may as well be hanged for a pound as a lamb. I mean——’
‘I know what you mean,’ Caroline interrupted. ‘Here you are. It’s just on twelve. Chew for all you’re worth, and when the Wilmington’s clock begins to strike put it on your eyes. And when it’s struck six of them take it off. Yes. I’ve thought about it all. I’m sure that’s right. Now, then, chew.’