Jean was much too wrapped up in her future to sympathise with anybody. ‘I dare say I shan’t have any children,’ she said, seized with a happy inspiration. ‘You can’t have everything, and I’d much sooner have a degree.’
Barbara looked at her in some doubt. ‘That’s all very well,’ she remarked, ‘but you’ll be jolly dull if you don’t look out. I don’t mean to go without children; I’m going to have millions of ’em–all boys–see if I don’t! Then we can always be sure of having enough for sides, without inviting strangers to come and play. You can never be sure how strangers are going to play, and sometimes they spoil the game, and that’s a bore.’
‘If you have boys of your own, you’ll be a mother; and if you’re a mother, you won’t join in the games at all. Mothers only sit and look on, and send the ones to bed that can’t agree,’ said Angela, with an air of experience.
‘I don’t advise you to be a mother, Babe,’ added Jean, earnestly. ‘You’ll have to mend such a lot of socks, and p’r’aps make babies’ clothes too; and you’ve been a whole term getting round the hem of one flannel petticoat, as it is.’
‘You can get things ready-made,’ answered Barbara, but her tone did not sound hopeful. She had to own sadly to herself that she was not cut out for a mother, and she fell back on the more practical futures of other people. ‘Wilfred’s going to be a doctor, after all,’ she told them, with great pride. ‘Auntie Anna says she’ll stand all the money that father can’t, and he’s going to St. Thomas’s–Will is, I mean. Isn’t it awfully splendid?’
Her friends murmured something appropriate, but they were not deeply interested in the career of Wilfred. At school, the girls’ conversation was largely made up of details of this kind; but Crofts was not school, and neither Jean nor Angela felt inspired to carry on the discussion. Babs, however, failed to notice their want of enthusiasm. Everything was happening exactly like the fairy story she had planned, the fairy story that had begun in the old London house, on the day that a certain dragon had entered it as a fairy godmother; and for the moment she was back again in her own kingdom, where the old witch still wandered about in her steeple-hat, in the company of Kit the prince, and where the twice-disenchanted beast was placing a crown on the charming head of the princess who had waited so long for him, and where a crowd of other princesses, after breaking their heads and their legs and suffering numerous unpleasant penalties of the kind, had at last returned from their banishment and were hailing the child herself as their queen. But one familiar figure was still missing from her fairy kingdom; and the little queen came sadly back to the world under the cedar tree, with a sigh and a murmured remark about ‘America’ and ‘lectures’ that her listeners only half understood. They recognised the Babe’s very natural wish for her father’s return, but they did not know how the wish had grown into a longing since her accident, during the weary days in which there had been no school to distract her, and nothing to do but to think.
‘He’ll be back in two months, won’t he?’ asked Jean, meaning to be sympathetic, though her manner was awkward.
‘Two months!’ echoed Babs, dolefully, ‘What’s two months?’
‘It’s years, isn’t it?’ responded Angela, with her accustomed inaccuracy.
Having secured their sympathy, such as it was, Barbara allowed herself to become more doleful still. ‘He must have missed all our letters, too,’ she sighed. ‘The last one he sent us was from some awful American place, that Kit says is in the map if you’ve got a month to look for it, only you haven’t!–and he never told us where to write next, and he didn’t say a word about me. So he’s not even heard yet that I fell off the rings!’