“It is indeed a pretty house; they all are. But they are so horribly shaky. The minarets are top-heavy, I fear. That’s the fault of the makers of these bricks. They ought to make the solid ones in proper proportion. But they can’t be persuaded.”
“Knock it down,” said Martha, thrusting forth a mischievous hand, which was caught in time to prevent entire destruction of the precious edifice. Half the minarets had fallen.
“They must go up again,” said Hadria. “How cruel to spoil all the work and all the beauty.” But Martha laughed with the delight of easy conquest.
She watched with great interest the reconstruction, and seemed anxious that every detail should be finished and worthy her iconoclasm. Having satisfied herself that her strength would not be wasted on an incomplete object, she made a second attempt to lay the palace low. Again she was frustrated. The building had soared, by this time, to an ambitious height, and its splendour had reached the limits of the materials at command. The final pinnacle which was required to cope the structure had been mislaid. Hadria was searching for it, when Martha, seizing her chance, struck the palace a blow in its very heart, and in an instant, the whole was a wreck.
“Oh, if that is to be the way of it, why should I build?” asked Hadria.
Martha gave the command for another ornamental object which she might destroy.
“One would suppose you were a County-Council,” Hadria exclaimed, “or the practical man. No, you shall have no more beauty to annihilate, little Vandal.”
Martha, however, was now engaged in dissecting a doll, and presently a stream of sawdust from its chest announced that she had accomplished her dearest desire. She had found out what was inside that human effigy.
“I wish I could get at the sawdust that I am stuffed with,” Hadria thought dreamily, as she watched the doll grow flabbier. “It is wonderful how little one does know one’s own sawdust. It would be convenient to feel a little surer just now, for evidently I shall need it all very soon. And I feel somewhat like that doll, with the stream pouring out and the body getting limp.”
She rose at last, and went to the window. The radiance of sun and green trees and the stir of human life; the rumble of omnibuses and the sound of wheels; the suggestion to the imagination of the river just a little way off, and the merry little bateaux-mouches—it was too much. Hadria rang for Hannah; asked her to take the child for a walk in the Bois, stooped down to kiss the little upturned face, and went off.