“I did practise,” said Vertebrata.
“Then practise and practise,” said her mother, not knowing how else to tell her to do her whole hour. Her mother didn’t know hours, but she knew by the feel of her feelings when Vertebrata had done enough.
So Vertebrata sat on a rock and did five minutes more, and came and threw her pipes on her bed of skins, and remembered and hung them up, and then turned toward the door of the cave. But her mother looked up from the flesh-pot and called her back again.
“Vertebrata,” she said, “do you want mother to have to speak to you again?”
“No, indeed, muvver,” said her little daughter.
“Then practise and practise and practise,” said her mother. “If you can’t play when you grow up, what will people think?”
So Vertebrata went back to her landscape rock, and this thing was repeated until Vertebrata had practised what we now know (but she did not know) to have been a whole hour. And you can easily see that in order to bring this about, what her mother must have said to her the last time of all was this:—
“I want you to practise and practise and practise and practise and practise and practise and practise and practise and practise and practise and practise and practise—” or something almost as long.
Now of course it was very hard for her mother to say all this besides roasting the flesh and tidying the cave, so she made up her mind that when her Prehistoric Husband came home, he must be told about it. And when the sun was at the top of the sky and cast no shadow, and the flesh was roasted brown and fragrant, she dressed it with pungent herbs, and raked the vegetables out of the ashes and hid the dessert in the cool wall of the cave—that was a surprise—and spread the flat rock at the door of the cave and put vine-leaves in her hair and, with Vertebrata, set herself to wait.
There went by what we now know to have been noon, and another hour, and more hours, and all afternoon, and all early twilight, and still her Prehistoric Husband did not come home to dinner. Vertebrata was crying with hunger, and the flesh and the vegetables were ice-cold, and the Prehistoric Wife and Mother sat looking straight before her without smiling. And then, just as the moon was rising red over the soft breast of the distant wood, the Prehistoric Father appeared, not looking as if he had done anything.