“We–w–w–well,” cried Bob, who was afflicted with a stammer when he was excited, “I didn’t c–c–ut off my eyelashes, anyway! Norah went up to her room one day and p–played barber’s shop. She cut lumps off her hair wherever she could get at it, till she looked like an Indian squaw, and then she s–s–snipped off her eyelashes till there wasn’t a hair left. She was sent to bed as w–well as me.”
“They have grown again since then,” said Norah, shutting one eye, and screwing up her face in a vain effort to prove the truth of her words. “I had been to see Lettice have her hair cut that day, and I was longing to try what it felt like. I knew it was naughty, but I couldn’t stop, it was too fascinating. ... Oh, Lettice, do you remember when you sucked your thumb?”
Lettice threw up her hands with a little shriek of laughter. “Oh, how funny it was! I used to suck my thumb, Rex, until I was quite a big girl, six years old, I think, and one day mother spoke to me seriously, and said I really must give it up. If I didn’t I was to be punished; if I did, I was to get a prize. I said, ‘Well, may I suck my thumb as long as ever I like to-day, for the very last time?’ Mother said I might, so I sat on the stairs outside the nursery door and sucked my thumb all day long—hours, hours, and hours, and after that I was never seen to suck it again. I had had enough!”
“It must be awfully nice to belong to a large family,” said Rex wistfully. “You can have such fun together. Edna and I were very quiet at home, but I had splendid times at school, and sometimes I used to bring some of the fellows down to stay with me in the holidays. One night I remember—hallo, here’s the Mouse! I thought you were having a nice little sleep on the schoolroom sofa, Mouse. Come here and sit by me.”
Geraldine advanced to the fireplace in her usual deliberate fashion. She was quite calm and unruffled, and found time to smile at each member of the party before she spoke.
“So I was asleep, only they’s a fire burning on the carpet of the schoolroom, and it waked me up.”
“Wh–at?”
“They’s a fire burning in the miggle of the carpet—a blue fire, jest like a plum pudding!”
There was a simultaneous shriek of dismay, as work, scissors, and chestnuts were thrown wildly on the floor, and the Bertrand family rushed upstairs in a stampede of excitement. The schoolroom door stood open, the rug thrown back from the couch on which the Mouse had been lying, and in the centre of the well-worn carpet, little blue flames were dancing up and down, exactly as they do on a Christmas pudding which has been previously baptised with spirit. Bob cast a guilty look at his brother, who stuck his hands in his pockets and looked at the conflagration with smiling patronage.
“Phosphorus pentoxide P2O5,” he remarked coolly. “What a lark!”