“She must have been very frightened,” said Quixtus, involuntarily—and the echo of the words after passing his lips sounded strange in his ears.
“She got quite white,” said Sheila. She picked up the shapeless animal. “She never recovered. Look!”
“She also lost one side of her whiskers,” said Quixtus, inspecting the beast held within two inches of his nose.
“Oh no,” she replied, getting in the most entangling way between his legs. “Pinkie’s a fairy princess, and one day she’ll have a crown and a pink dress and a gold sword. It’s a wicked fairy that keeps her like a cat. And it was the wicked fairy in the shape of a big rat, bigger than twenty million, billion, hillion houses, that bit off her whiskers. Daddy told me.”
Quixtus could not follow these transcendental flights of faërie. But he had to make some reply, as she was looking with straight challenge into his eyes. To his astonishment, he found himself expressing the hope that, when Pinkie came into her own again, the loss of one set of whiskers would not impair her beauty. Sheila explained that princesses didn’t have whiskers, so no harm was done. The bad fairy in the form of a rat wanted to bite off Pinkie’s nose, in which case her beauty would have been ruined; but Pinkie was protected by a good fairy, and just when the bad fairy was going to bite off her nose, the good fairy shook a pepper pot and the bad fairy sneezed and was only able to bite off the whiskers.
“That was very fortunate for Pinkie,” said Quixtus.
“Very,” said Sheila. She stood against him on one leg, swinging the other. Conversation came to a standstill. The man found himself tongue-tied. All kinds of idiotic remarks came into his head. He dismissed them as not being suitable to the comprehension of a child of five. His fingers mechanically twisted themselves in her soft hair. Presently came the eternal command of childhood.
“Tell me a story.”
“Good gracious!” said he, “I’m afraid I don’t know any.”
“You must know little Red Riding-Hood,” she said, with a touch of scorn.