“You can’t because I say you can’t.”
“Oh, Jeremy, do let——”
He started up from his chair, all rage and indignation.
“Look here, Mary, if you go on talking——”
She walked away down the garden, her head hanging in that tiresome way it had when she was unhappy. Hamlet tried to follow her, so he called him back. He came, but was quite definitely in the sulks, sitting, his head raised, very proud, wrath in his eyes, snapping angrily at an occasional fly.
“Redgauntlet” was spoilt for Jeremy. He put the book down and tried to placate Hamlet who knew his power and refused to be placated. Why didn’t he let Mary take Hamlet? What a pig he was! He would be nice to Mary when she came back. But when she did return that face of hers, with its beseeching look, irritated him so deeply that he snapped at her more than before.
After all, “Robinson Crusoe” was a book for boys. . . .
Two days later he had decided, quite definitely, that he could not part with it. He must find something else for her, something very fine indeed, the best thing that he had. He thought of every possible way of making money, but time was so short and ways of making money quickly were so few. He thought of asking his father for the pocket-money of many weeks in advance, but it would have to be so very many weeks in advance to be worth anything at all, and his father would want to know what he needed the money for; and after the episode of last Christmas he did not wish to say anything about presents. He thought of selling something; but there was no place to sell things in, and he had not anything that anyone else wanted. He thought of asking his mother; but she would send him to his father who always managed the family finances.
He went over all his private possessions. The trouble with them was that Mary knew them all so well.
Impossible to pretend that there was anything there that she could want! He collected the most hopeful of them and laid them out on the bed—a pocket-knife, three books, a photograph frame (rubbed at the edges), a watch chain that had seemed at first to be silver but now most certainly wasn’t, a leather pocket-book, a red blotting pad—not a very brilliant collection.