'No, the tuffet,' said April.
May absolutely refused to be the curds and whey, and didn't at all like the idea of being a tuffet, a thing for others to sit on, a mute and inglorious three-legged stool, with nothing to say and nothing to do; but she generally did as she was told, and after some grumbling was persuaded to go on all fours, whereupon April took her seat with great dignity on her back, and holding a cup with chocolate dregs to represent the curds and whey, lifted up her voice and gave tongue to the opening lines of the immortal ditty. Then there was a wild yell such as never yet had been heard to issue from any spider, and June flung herself on to the only vacant bit of tuffet she could see, and as it was May's head and as she was a very fat and heavy spider, the tuffet collapsed under the shock, flattening itself out straight, and they all fell, shrieking loudly, into a heap. There was such a tangle of arms and legs that the mother found it difficult to sort them out, and set each baby on the feet that belonged to it again; and besides, she was laughing, and you know what your thumbs feel like when you laugh, and how weak they get, and how they won't pull. 'Miss Muffet's too hard to act,' she said, comforting them, 'because of that tiresome tuffet. Try Mary, Mary. One can be Mary, and the other two the row of pretty maids. Two are just enough for a row.'
'And if one went away from that row—then?' inquired June. But her mother sat down to the piano, and refused to argue.
This succeeded better. The pretty maids sang the first half, and April, dancing up and down her garden path in front of them, answered their questions with cheerful shrillness. They sang it over and over again. The mother had to play it so often that she got to dislike it with all her heart, and still they went on, the pretty maids beating time with their feet, and the busy Mary flying up and down faster and faster and more and more breathlessly, her hair streaming out behind, and her face aflame. At last the mother felt as though she were being mesmerized, and hardly noticed what they were doing, till a strange spluttering noise made her look up, and there stood the pretty maids gasping, with their eyes and noses and mouths full of chocolate which April was diligently pouring out of the jug on to their heads, muttering as she did so 'Doch, doch, Du musst begossen werden,'—'Yes, yes, thou must be watered.'
Now this was a dreadful thing to do, and could only be excused by the state of wild excitement into which she had worked herself over the part of Mary. The mother was so astonished that for a moment she sat looking on without saying a word. The pretty maids, though they choked, quite entered into the spirit of the thing, and felt that as they were growing in a garden it was only right they should be watered. And besides, the chocolate was very nice still, in spite of its being cold, and trickled agreeably down into the mouths they were careful to hold as wide open as they would go. But they wouldn't go wide enough, and most of it trickled down over their pinafores to the edge of their dresses, and then dropped off in thick drops on to their mother's favourite carpet, making dark and horrid pools at their feet.
Oh, it was a dreadful ending to a party! And the worst of it was they were so excited that they never gave a thought to the dreadfulness of it, which made it very difficult for their mother to rebuke them. 'Oh,' she said, pointing to the two pools on the carpet, 'Oh,' and when she had said that she stopped, and didn't seem able to go on. I don't know whether she was trying not to cry at the spoilt carpet, or trying not to laugh at the spoilt babies, who looked pitiable objects now with their heads all over chocolate, while April stood staring at them in consternation, the empty jug in her hand.
After you have been very excited and happy there is always a horrible time that comes when you feel so flat, and dull, and stale, that you are more like ginger-beer without the ginger and the froth than anything else. That is how the babies felt when they were having the chocolate washed off their faces and heads, and were being put, with all the fizz gone out of them, into premature beds. It was very difficult to get the chocolate out of their hair, and Séraphine expressed her disapproval by scrubbing with such pitiless vigour that they felt quite dazed. And then it was bewildering besides having their heads washed on any night but Saturday. It seemed to upset things so, and they were used to regular ways,—head-washing on Saturday nights, clean clothes on Sunday morning, a smell of soap-suds pervading the passages on Monday—that is what had always happened ever since the world, with people in it wanting washing, began. Eve, explained April to June in subdued murmurs while they were undressing, used to wash her long yellow hair on Saturdays too, dipping it up and down in the waters of Paradise; and as soap wasn't among the things that grew on the trees there, she used bananas instead, which were after all much more like soap than like bananas; and June asked whether she ate what was left over of the soap, when she had finished her washing, and April said people didn't eat soap, and June said people did eat bananas, and they talked it over in whispers, trying vainly to settle it, as they went shivering to bed.