I had a recurring struggle with myself not to write and tell him. When I had been "good" and wanted to give myself a treat, I allowed myself to go over in imagination that coming scene in which he should be told the Great Secret.
My mother sometimes spoke a little anxiously about Bettina's being so much with Hermione. She surprised me one day by asking me outright if I thought the increasing intimacy was likely to do Bettina harm.
My feeling about it was too vague to produce. I could only suggest that if she was afraid of anything of the kind, why should she not speak to Betty?
"The child has so few pleasures," was the answer, with that brooding look of tenderness which the thought of Betty often brought into my mother's face. "Does she tell you what they talk about?"
"Oh, the usual things!" I answered discreetly. "Clothes, and people and dogs."
"Oh, as for dogs!—--" My mother dismissed the Chows. Bettina, in an unguarded moment, had admitted that she thought she could care for one dog. But she couldn't possibly care for eighteen. "What people do they discuss?"
"Oh, pretty much everybody, I should say."
She looked at me. "But some more than others. The Boynes, for instance."
When I said I didn't think so, my mother seemed a little chilled, as though she might be feeling "out of things."