“No,” said Lalage. “There was only me, but that’s the way editors always talk. Father told me so once.—‘Yet she did it. She sneaked. Yes, sneaked to the grown-up society, complained, as the now extinct Tommy used to do.”
“The allusion,” I said, “escapes me. Who was the now extinct Tommy?”
“The one before the Cat,” said Lalage.
“Her name,” said the Canon feebly, “was Miss Thomas. She did complain a good deal about Lalage during the six weeks she was with us.”
“Is that the whole of the article?” I asked. “It’s very short.”
“There was nothing more to say,” said Lalage; “so what was the good of going on?”
“I thought,” I said, “and hoped that there might have been something in it about the effect the stuff had on Tom Kitterick. I have never been able to find out anything about that.”
“It didn’t do much to Tom Kitterick,” said Lalage. “He was just as turkey eggy afterward as he was before. It didn’t even smart, though I rubbed it in for nearly half an hour, and Tom Kitterick said I’d have the skin off his face, which just shows the silly sort of stuff it was. Not that I’d expect the Cat to have anything else except silly stuff. That’s the kind she is. Anybody would know it by simply looking at her. Father, I don’t believe you’ve got my ticket. Hadn’t you better go and see about it?”
The Canon went in search of the station master and found him at last digging potatoes in a plot of ground beyond the signal box. It took some time to persuade him to part with anything so valuable as a ticket to Dublin.
“Lalage,” I said, while the Canon was arguing with the station master, “I want you to write to me from school and tell me how you are getting on.”