"Your affectionate brother,
"PHILIP."
There are limits to one's patience, and with some of us they are not very wide. Philip had passed the bounds of mine, and my natural indignation was heightened by a sort of revulsion from last night's anxiety on his account. His lordly indifference to other people's feelings was more irritating than the trouble he gave us by changing his mind.
"You won't let him take the Woolly Beast from me, Isobel?" cried Charles. "And you know you promised to lend me your ostrich plume."
"Certainly not," said I. "And you shall have the feather. I promised."
"If Mr. Clinton acts—I shan't," said Alice.
"Mr. Clinton won't act," said I, "I can't alter the piece now. But I wish, Alice, you were not always so very ready to drive things into a quarrel."
"If we hadn't given way to Philip so much he wouldn't think we can bear anything," said Alice.
I could not but feel that there was some truth in this, and that it was a dilemma not provided against in Aunt Isobel's teaching, that one may be so obliging to those one lives with as to encourage, if not to teach them to be selfish.
Perhaps it would have been well if on the first day when Philip deserted us Alice and I, had spent the afternoon with Lucy Lambent, and if we had continued to amuse ourselves with our friends when Philip amused himself with his. We should then have been forced into a common decision as to whether the play should be given up, and, without reproaches or counter-reproaches, Philip would have learned that he could not leave all the work to us, and then arrange and disarrange the plot at his own pleasure, or rather, he would never have thought that he could. But a plan of this kind requires to be carried out with perfect coolness to be either justifiable or effective. And we have not a cool head amongst us.