I felt that this was as far as I was at all likely to get in bringing Lalage to a better frame of mind. Her attitude toward her governess was very far indeed from that enjoined in the Church Catechism, but I lacked the courage to tell her so. Nor do I think I should have effected much even if I had been as brave in rebuke as an archdeacon or a bishop. Besides, I felt that I had accomplished something. Lalage had committed herself to an approval of a hypothetical Miss Battersby. If a governess could be found in the world who would stamp about the floor and shriek that word, or if Miss Battersby would learn the habit of violent profanity, Lalage would quite like her. It was a definite concession. I had a mental vision of the changed Miss Battersby, a lady freckled from head to foot, magnificently contemptuous of glycerine and cucumber, who hated clothes and tore them when she could, who rejoiced to see blue dresses with blobs of bright red paint on them, who scoffed openly at Blake’s poetry, who had been to sea or companied with private soldiers on the battlefield, and so garnered a store of scorching blasphemies. I imagined Lalage taking this paragon to her heart, clinging to her with warm affection, leading her into pigstys for confidential chats, and, if she published a magazine at all, calling it _Our Feline Friend_. But the dream faded, as such dreams do. Miss Battersby was plainly incapable of rising to the heights required. It is to my credit that in the end I did make an effort to soften Lalage. “I wish,” I said, “that you’d try and call her Pussy instead of Cat.” “Why? What’s the difference?” “The meaning is the same,” I said. “But it’s a much kinder way of putting it. You ought to try and be kind, Lalage.” She pondered this advice for a while and then said: “I would, if only she’d stop kissing me.” “Does she do it often?” “Every morning and every evening and sometimes during the day.” That settled it. I could not press my point. Once, years afterward, Miss Battersby very nearly kissed me, but even before there was any chance of such a thing I was able to sympathize with Lalage. I crept out of the pigsty and went home again, leading my injured bicycle. CHAPTER II