[p160]
For while it was one thing for all to say lightly, “We will write a book each,” the matter resolved itself into all the actual writing falling to Pauline, for the sad and simple reason that none of the others could write.
So Pauline leaned back and gave herself airs.
“I shall write my own story first,” she said, “and you are none of you to speak a word to interrupt me, or I won’t write yours at all. Max, stop scratching on the table; Muffie, don’t shuffle your feet like that, you put my vein out.” The last was a slightly tangled remark picked up from Miss Kinross who had been heard to speak of various interruptions putting her brother out of vein.
Muffie, thwarted in her desire to scratch a horse upon the surface of the table, fell to filling up a crack in it with sand scooped up from the floor and mixed, when the writing lady was not looking, to a pleasing consistency with ink.
Lynn lay face downwards on a bench and bent all her energies to composing the story that Pauline would shortly write at her dictation.
Max simply strolled to the door; the little girls might be under Pauline’s thumb, but no one expected him really to obey any one except his father.
[p161]
“Call me when you’re leady,” he said to Pauline, “I’ll be sitting on the loof.”
And Muffie, suffering from her enforced inactivity, soon had the tantalizing sight of sections of his brown legs displayed through the lattice work above her head.
Scratch, scratch went Pauline’s pen—scratch, scratch along line after line. Evidently she was not troubled with any lack of ideas.
Twenty minutes, half an hour slipped away. Lynn had long since composed her tale and had fallen to playing a fairy drama at the end of her bench with bits of moss and white pebbles from the floor.