"He mustn't wait," she said. "It's all right. Grevill knows. We told him he was to do Lankester first."
I groaned. "It doesn't matter," I said, "which he does first."
"You mean he'll be driven anyway?"
It was so far from what I meant that I could only stare at her and at her frightful failure to perceive.
I went at it again, as I thought, with a directness that left nothing to her intelligence. I told her what I meant was that he couldn't do them both.
But she didn't see it. She just looked at me with her terrible innocence.
"You mean it's too much for him?"
And I tried to begin again with no, it wasn't exactly that—but she went on over me.
It wouldn't be too much for him if he didn't go at it so hard. He was giving himself more to do than was necessary. He'd marked so many things for omission; and, of course, the more he left out of "Papa," the more he had to put in of his own.
"And he needn't," she said. "There's such a lot of Papa."