"What are you going to teach me?" she asked. "I don't think I want to be taught, auntie; I can read, I have been reading to Flossy, and I can write, and hem father's handkerchiefs. Ask nursie."
"But you would like to play to dear father, and to learn all sorts of pretty hymns to say to him, would you not, my darling! There are many things you will have to know before you are a woman."
"I don't mean to be a woman ever, I think," observed Flurry; "I like being a child better. Nursie is a woman, and nursie won't play; she says she is old and stupid."
A happy inspiration came to me. "If you are good and learn your lessons, I will play with you," I said, rather timidly; "that is, if you care for a grown-up playfellow."
I was only seventeen, in spite of my pronounce features, and I could still enter into the delights of a good drawn battle of battledore and shuttlecock. Perhaps it was the repressed enthusiasm of my tone, for I really meant what I said; but Flurry's brief coldness vanished, and she caught at my hand at once.
"Come and see them," she said; "I did not know you liked dolls, but you shall have one of your own if you like;" and she led me to a corner of the nursery where a quantity of dolls in odd costumes and wonderfully constrained attitudes were arranged round an inverted basket.
"Joseph and his brethren," whispered Flurry. "I am going to put him in the pit directly, only I wondered what I should do for the camels—this is Issachar, and this Gad. Look at Gad's turban."
It was almost impossible to retain my gravity. I could see Miss Lucas smiling in the window seat. Joseph and his brethren—what a droll idea for a child! But I did not know then that Flurry's dolls had to sustain a variety of bewildering parts. When I next saw them the smart turbans were all taken off the flaxen heads, a few dejected sawdust bodies hung limply round a miller's cart. "Ancient Britons," whispered Flurry. "Nurse would not let me paint them blue, but they did not wear clothes then, you know." In fact, our history lesson was generally followed by a series of touching tableaux vivants, the dolls sustaining their parts in several moving scenes of "Alfred and the Cakes," "Hubert and Arthur," and once "the Battle of Cressy."
Flurry and I parted the best of friends; and when we joined Uncle Geoffrey in the drawing-room I was quite ready to enter on my duties at once.
Miss Lucas stipulated for my services from ten till five; a few simple lessons in the morning were to be followed by a walk, I was to lunch with them, and in the afternoon I was to amuse Flurry or teach her a little—just as I liked.