"Now do you think?" I said, "when you come to think of it a second time, that you really need Helen in Paris any more than you do me? When she is a little older she will want to go there just as much as you do now, and then she can go. But now, don't you think that you should like to have her off your mind as well as me, and don't you think that she could do a good deal toward cheering me up there in London, while you are gone?"
Helen looked at her mother to see what she was going to say. She said nothing at all, but she looked at Helen in a way that meant that she might do just as she pleased about it, and Helen said: "If you don't mind very much, I think I will stay in London."
Helen's mother did not mind very much, so I said: "Very well, then; this is what we will do. We will go all the way to Dover with you, and then we will come back to London and have as good a time as we can, till you come back from having the best time that ever was in the world, in Paris. And when you are with us again we will come back here to Glastonbury and go to some other good places."
Nobody could make the least objection to that. And so the next day but one Helen and I found that we were left quite to ourselves in London. We found plenty of things to amuse us. We went to see the Tower of London, as Americans do. We found the old armor and weapons that were there most interesting, and Helen made a discovery. "Did King Arthur's knights wear armors like those?" she asked.
"Yes," I said, "about like those."
"With all those chains and iron things?"
"Yes, to be sure."
"Then I know what became of the green lace girdles that Gawain and the rest of them had."
"Very well; what did become of them?"
"Why, don't you see? They all wore out. They wouldn't last a week, if they put them round their waists, with all those iron things on."