In another hour all their stock of remains had been used up, and they had had a banquet, which they cut rather short, however, on realising the dulness of only pretending to eat; and then, instead of tidying everything up, and washing the saucepans and plates like good children, they leant disconsolately against the window-sills, staring out into the white world outside through little holes they had scratched in the frost on the panes, and flattened their noses, and felt cross.
'Don't push so, you awful June,' said April, giving June an impatient shove. They often talked English together, though they were German babies, and if it was not quite like the English that little girls in England talk, neither was it, I am sure, any worse than the German would be that English children of the same age might try to talk.
‘Don’t push so, you awful June’
'I doesn't push,' said June blandly: and pushed with all her might.
June was a short, thick baby, and couldn't reach up to the windows as comfortably as the other two; and besides, April had scratched lovely big eye-holes with her nails in the ice on the pane, and June coveted them. Do you know what covet means? It is a dreadful feeling that seizes people when they see somebody else with the things they would like and haven't got, and makes them feel as though they were going to burst. June was sure she would burst if she didn't soon get April's holes, so she pushed and wriggled with all her strength, and when April protested, merely repeated reassuringly 'I doesn't push.'
But April was not to be put off like that, and finding that her legs were being violently dragged away from beneath her, swooped down on June, who would not let her go, and they both rolled over on the floor together, while May sat on her window-sill kicking her heels in great delight, and egged them on with cheers.
Then Séraphine, their French nurse, came in, and threw up her hands aghast at what she saw,—the room all littered with bran and doll's hair, the table covered with the remains of the feast, the sofa strewn with saucepans, and the two babies rolling over and over each other on the floor.