"But I want to think of things now that will be useful long before I am old," Mollie persisted. "There is such a tremendous lot of things to be done, Aunt Mary. And things have to be thoughts long before they are things. I expect the person who invented aeroplanes thought about them for ages and ages before he began to make one."
"I haven't the slightest doubt of it," Aunt Mary agreed, "but you are wandering from your subject, which was the smallness of Great Britain."
"No, I'm not—at least not exactly, I want to make Great Britain greater, and I can't think of a way. I should like to have plenty of room and plenty of time."
"That won't be an easy problem for you to solve, my lambkin," Aunt Mary said. "As a matter of fact there is room enough, in the country, but people prefer to live in towns. You will have to hire a pied piper and pipe all the babies into the fields."
Mollie shook her head, her eyes resting again upon the distant downs. "I don't know," she said seriously, "but something will have to be done some day, Aunt Mary, besides play-centres. They are good, but they aren't enough. Too many children die. Mother goes to a children's home once a week, and she took me once. You should just see those babies. And they could be such dear little things too. Why—" Mollie hesitated for a moment and then went on, "Why don't more people go to live in Australia and Canada? The maps are full of empty spaces."
"Ah, Mollie my dear, that's not so easy as it sounds," Aunt Mary said, folding up her work and rising to her feet. "There are all sorts of complications when it comes to shifting camp from the Old World to the New. But perhaps—perhaps if everyone in this old country could be persuaded to think of the children first—! In the meantime I must go and get lunch for my particular child."
Probably Aunt Mary's mind was running on those sick babies of the poor as she played to Mollie that afternoon, for her fingers wandered off into the tune of a song she had not heard sung since her childhood:
"'T is the song, the sigh of the weary:
Hard times, hard times, come again no more!
Many days you have lingered around our cottage door—
Oh, hard times, come again no more!"
Mollie lay listening, the unopened album in her lap. She was drowsy after her morning in the garden, and thought she would rest her eyes by closing them for five minutes. "A little darkness will do them good after all that sunshine," she murmured to herself.
It was very pleasant lying in the quiet room, on that broad sofa, listening to Aunt Mary's soft music. Mingling with the sound of the piano was the droning hum of a foolish bee, who had got on the wrong side of the window and was now making vain efforts to fly home again through the glass. A delicious scent came from somewhere—perhaps from the syringa bushes growing just outside the open window. Mollie's lazy eyelids fell over her eyes—"Just five minutes—"