MAX RUNS AMUCK
Greenways was overwhelmed with horror. It felt it ought to draw a veil of mist round its face and shrink from the public gaze instead of standing there brazenly smiling as usual amid its trees and flowers and pretending it was the abode of innocence and content.
Miss Bibby was extremely upset, sufficiently so to be nearly helpless in the crisis. The little girls whispered together with horrified and excited eyes and more than inclined to a theory that nothing short of a cable to New Zealand recalling their parents could adequately deal with the present situation.
Anna, who had quarrelled with her baker, said she was not in the least surprised, for men and boys were all the same, downright black at heart.
But Max stood fast in his iniquity.
Max, four-year old Max—whose “trousers” [p206] did not measure three inches in the inner seam of the leg—Max, who was not yet entirely initiated into the difficulties of speech, had broken forth into “language!”
No one knew where he could have possibly heard the hair-raising phrase. Certainly there was the gardener, Blake, about the premises who, being of the downright black-hearted sex, might have let fall the words Max had evidently garnered and laid by with such care and accuracy until occasion offered.
But he was so surly and monosyllabic a man that the children gave him the widest of berths, and therefore that theory was unlikely.
Anna aspersed the character of Larkin. A boy with hair that colour, she maintained, must be subject to periodical explosions, and it was probably during one of them that Max had secreted his bit of dynamite. But the little girls gave Larkin the warmest testimonials. In all the time they had known him he had never been guilty of anything stronger than “My jiggery!”
It all began with a bib at breakfast time.