The General is six now, and answers to the name of Peter on the occasions that Pip does not call him Jumbo, and Bunty, Billy. Nell, who is inclining to elegant manners, ventures occasionally in company to address him as Rupert; but he generally winks or says “Beg pardon?” in a vacant kind of way.
Baby also has become “Poppet,” and handed down her name of long standing to a rightful claimant who disjointed the General’s nose nearly three years ago and made our number up to seven again.
[12]
]Just a wee, chubby morsel of a girl it is, with sunshiny eyes and sunshiny hair and a ceaseless supply of sunshiny smiles.
Even her tears are sunshiny; they are so short-lived that the smiles shine through and make them things of beauty.
The boys generally call her “The Scrap,” though she is as big as most three-year-olds. She was christened Esther.
And Poppet is still a child,—to be nine is scarcely to have reached years of discretion.
She has lost her chubbiness, and developed abnormally long, thin legs and arms, a surprising capacity for mischief, and the tenderest little heart in the world.
So Meg’s hands were fairly well filled for the afternoon, to keep these three young ones in check, darn the socks, and superintend kitchen arrangements, which meant Martha Tomlinson and the cook.
She had not bargained for the tussle with Nell too.
That young person was at a difficult age just now: too old—in her own eyes, at any rate—to romp with Bunty and Poppet; too young to take a place beside Meg and pay visits with Esther,—she hung between, and had just compromised matters by letting down [13] ]her frocks, as years ago Meg had done in the privacy of her bedroom.