“I’ll send you up a boy,” promised Miss Janie.
I thanked her. “And now we come to the donkey.”
“Nathaniel,” explained Miss Janie, in answer to her father’s look of enquiry. “We don’t really want it.”
“Janie,” said Mr. St. Leonard in a tone of authority, “I insist upon being honest.”
“I was going to be honest,” retorted Miss Janie, offended.
“My daughter Veronica has given me to understand,” I said, “that if I buy her this donkey it will be, for her, the commencement of a new and better life. I do not attach undue importance to the bargain, but one never knows. The influences that make for reformation in human character are subtle and unexpected. Anyhow, it doesn’t seem right to throw a chance away. Added to which, it has occurred to me that a donkey might be useful in the garden.”
“He has lived at my expense for upwards of two years,” replied St. Leonard. “I cannot myself see any moral improvement he has brought into my family. What effect he may have upon your children, I cannot say. But when you talk about his being useful in a garden—”
“He draws a cart,” interrupted Miss Janie.
“So long as someone walks beside him feeding him with carrots. We tried fixing the carrot on a pole six inches beyond his reach. That works all right in the picture: it starts this donkey kicking.”
“You know yourself,” he continued with growing indignation, “the very last time your mother took him out she used up all her carrots getting there, with the result that he and the cart had to be hauled home behind a trolley.”