“Thursdays?”
“Thursdays?”
“The day the Room gets turned out,” Merle enlightened their double ignorance.
“Oh!”
“It seems rather a shame that Merle should be bothered with all that,” Stuart mused thoughtfully. “What about having a property Womanly-Woman to see to the dusting?”
Peter assented rather reluctantly; she was quite sure that the Womanly-woman would make her wear gloves. “Oh well! if she became at all obstreperous, we could always break her up, and re-form her as something else. An Ancient Retainer, say; or a Rabbit. These Plasticine figures are awfully useful.”
“There’d be a bit of Womanly-Woman over from a Rabbit; enough to make a tea-spoon, or a halo, or any domestic trifle of that description.”
“Then are we to have no real human people in the Room, except just ourselves?” Merle queried. “No—children?”
Stuart shook his head. “No children. Only childishness.” For he recognized, deep down in his heart, that real children would stigmatize the Room and all it contained, as “silly rot.” And demand bricks and Noah’s Arks and Tiddley-winks. And somehow the knowledge hurt; because he knew with what fatal ease he too could slide outside and say the same: “Silly rot—silly rot——” “It isn’t! Rot, if you like—not silly rot!”... but even now he was slipping.... “It isn’t! it isn’t—Peter....”