“Me a girl?” said David. “But I couldn’t. Think of the things girls have to do. It’s ridiculous.” Margery felt she must stand up for her sex. “I don’t see that the things we have to do are more ridiculous than your smoking, or keeping those beastly stag-beetles,” said she, for she shared Bags’s horror of that which crawled. David got up with extraordinary dignity. “Those are the things I told you in confidence,” he said. “Well, and whom have I told?” demanded Margery. “Besides, they’re all finished,” said David. “You shouldn’t bring them up against me.” “I didn’t; I was only arguing.” “Then let’s stop arguing,” said David. “Lord, it’s only just three. There’s that beastly cathedral clock striking. I suppose that’s Norman, too, isn’t it? What are we to do?” Margery made a little sympathetic grimace at David. “Oh, David, I do understand,” she said, “and I’m so sorry you’re bored. I know exactly what’s the matter with you.” “Wish you’d tell me,” said David. “You know, too, really. You’ve dropped one lot of things and haven’t got the next lot yet. Then there’s this. Do you remember that green snake you used to keep, and how, when it was changing its skin, it used to lie quite still, not eating or drinking, and seeming awfully depressed? I expect that sort of thing is happening to you. I shouldn’t a bit wonder if our minds changed their skins now and then, just like snakes.” David was interested in this, but it was necessary, in his present humour, to be rather depreciatory. “Girls do have such rum notions,” he said. “I can’t think where you get them from. But what then?” “Just that. You have been a little boy up till now, although you were no end of a swell at Helmsworth, and you’re just beginning to see it. You know you would have been furious with me if I had told you, even only last holidays, that you were only a little boy. But you don’t mind now because you know it yourself. You’re changing your skin. What—oh, I forget that word of yours, the Marchester one.” “Piffle?” suggested David. “Yes. What piffle you would have thought the Keats Ode only a few months ago, and at that time you thought it grand and grown-up to smoke.” David sat down again, thoroughly interested in his own metamorphosis. “Yes, that’s rum,” he said. “No, not really. It’s just growing up.” “It sounds sort of philosophical,” said he. Margery picked up two or three fallen mulberries, and put them into her mouth absently, one after the other. “I dare say,” she said. “Oh, David, do be quick about changing your skin, and let me see the new one. And now let’s go and do something. I vote we go and look at that old bookstall by the Priory Gate. We might find a Keats among the cheap lots in the tray. You asked me to come and look for one this morning.” She held out her hands to her brother, and he pulled her up. “Right oh!” he said. “I say, Margery, you’re not a bad sort.” And Margery was extremely content.