“Here, Helen, you hold his hands, and Kenneth, you hold his feet tight. That’s right. Don’t let go,” ordered Zaidie, getting her assistants into place. “Now, George, I won’t hurt you much, and it’s for your own good, you know,” with a funny imitation of Eliza’s tone.
Zaidie tipped the little oil-can and poked it carefully down into George Washington’s unwilling ear. It tickled him, and he shook his head impatiently. The children held him rigidly, and Zaidie let the cold oil trickle down. At the first touch of it, George Washington gave a wild yelp, and with extended claws and uprising fur, he sprang from the children’s grasp, leaving such a dig in Kenneth’s soft little hand that he immediately set up an unearthly howl, which brought Marjorie to the rescue.
The astonished twins stood staring at each other. Marjorie took up Kenneth in her arms, kissed the hurt place, and asked the children what they had been doing to excite George Washington to such an unusual pitch of wrath.
“We only tried to oil him in his little oil-holes in his ears, ’cause he squeaked so, Marjorie,” explained bewildered Zaidie, “and I don’t believe he liked it. But his voice was dreffully rusty,—truly it was.”
“Oil him?” said Marjorie. “You absurd child! Animals don’t need oiling.”
“Yes, they do,” insisted Zaidie. “’Liza oiled Kenneth’s baa-lamb the other day. The big woolly one, up there, you know. She oiled it down in its squeaks. And she rubbed something greasy on my chest when I had the croup. Don’t you remember how my breath squeaked? She said she oiled me. There!”
“Oh, you funny little things!” said Marjorie, laughing at them. “Well, don’t try it again, anyway, on George Washington. He doesn’t like it, you see, and you don’t want to be scratched, do you? Don’t cry any more, baby, dear. You’re a little man, and men don’t cry for a scratch like that, you know.”
Marjorie set the children playing something else, and then returned to her book. She was usually a capable and efficient guardian in the nursery, eldest-daughter fashion, but this afternoon she was deep in a fascinating book that must go back to the library to-morrow. In two minutes she was absorbed in it again, to the exclusion of her little charges.
Zaidie looked around for pastures new. The children were not usually a mischievous set, but now and then, like grown people, they delighted in the unexpected.
As Helen wanted a drink, all three trooped into the nursery bathroom, which opened off the nursery. It was a pretty bathroom, with the walls covered with blue and white sanitary paper, in a pretty tile-pattern, each tile having on it a Mother-Goose figure. A big, white, fur rug lay by the white porcelain bath-tub. A small water-cooler stood on a shelf, low enough for the children to help themselves to water.