The most astonishing part was its being Violet who was naughty and not me. I forget if I’ve said anything about Violet, but the little ones don’t count very much, for Ted is almost a baby, and Violet sits all day making doll’s clothes. Violet is seven, her birthday was in July, and she has straight, lighty-brown hair; I think her eyes are brown too, but she isn’t particularly dark like me, nor fair like Ted. She isn’t particularly anything, except good-tempered, and that she is tremendously. I expect it’s because she’s rather fat, because all the rest of us are “lean kine,” and we certainly aren’t very good-tempered, although we don’t all have it in the same way. Humphrey gets sulky and doesn’t speak at all, and Ted runs round and round the room slapping the chairs and saying, “Beast, beast, beast, beast,” as quickly as ever he can. As for me, when I get cross, I want to go away alone, and if I can’t, I’d like to slap the others, which is worse than chairs, only I don’t do it because it makes Mother unhappy; I believe it hurts her more than them. The curiousest part of Violet is that the things she is told to do are always the things she likes, so she must be an “_Engel Kind_,” as Fräulein says. And when once she is told a thing, she remembers it for ever; she’d make a simply splendid Casabianca. Humphrey and I always think that, however much we’d been told to sit still and not wriggle, when we saw the fire coming, we’d have forgotten all about it, and we’d have jumped up and tried to put it out. It doesn’t seem as if it ought to have been very difficult with all that water around, and I dare say the Father would have been just as pleased really as if we’d all been burnt. So you can understand now how astonished we were at Violet’s being naughty, though perhaps what she did wasn’t naughtiness exactly, but too much goodness, which seems to be nearly as bad. I’ve been wondering since if goodness isn’t Violet’s besetting sin, but I suppose it can’t be really. It’s something like being too punctual, I think. Father used to tell us that the Duke of Wellington owed his success in life to always being half an hour too early, but all I can say is, it’s lucky he didn’t have our Fräulein. One day we tried it, because there’d been such a lot of fuss about my being late for breakfast, so I got up exactly half an hour before we were called, and of course I made the others get up too. Well, when Fräulein came in, she simply stormed and said I was a “_Dummkopf_,” and did I want to give Teddy croup playing in a room without a fire? She set me half an hour’s extra practising too; so that just shows.