"Let's attack the garden now, Atom."
Nell was looking out of the window.
"There's that pretty little lame boy next door. I'm going down to talk to him."
"I don't want to come, thank you," Sheila Pat said to Denis.
"Eh? Why not?"
"A person," quoted the Atom, "may have reasons."
"You're a lazy Atom," said Denis, and strolled out of the room.
"The little boy's gone in," Molly observed.
The Atom slipped out of the room and downstairs after Denis. Denis sat on an old up-turned wheelbarrow and studied a book on shorthand and the garden alternately.
"It's a problem that requires a good deal of thought," he observed lazily. "A back yard: Item—a patch of bare ground adorned with ten and a half blades of grass. Item—a narrow ridge of clay running parallel with the walls, in which flowers are presumably meant to grow. Item—a careless mosaic of china, etc. Item—a wheelbarrow. Item—a dustbin. Item—a diminutive Atom ready to turn it all into an elysium of sweet flowers."