There were a great number of things she “didn’t hold with,” but they were not matters I was tenacious about myself, neither was Tom, so we let them drop. Later on I found that a certain amount of compromise was effected, such as a pair of dried ears exchanged for a short story before the fire, or some real tea offered for a quiet afternoon with a scrap-book; that was on days when Tom had Satan in one pocket and an Angel of Goodness in the other. He was a simple creature, and but for Anne would have kept his illusions much longer than he did. He thought that when he gave up his time to help in laying the nursery tea, things got on quicker than they would otherwise have done; that it saved nurse trouble to hand the spoons to him one by one and put them straight afterwards. Anne found for herself an occupation that she preferred. One of nurse’s articles of faith was that children should have their own place in the household and keep to it. There was a place for every one in her picture. The servants in the kitchen, the children in the nursery, the master in his study, and the mistress in the drawing-room, also pervading the whole house as, in a landscape, the sun and the blizzard pervade fields, lakes, woods, and mountains alike. To have the children the centre of general attention or running about the house would have seemed to her as revolutionary as trees planted on a dinner-table or poultry at large on a cricket-field. Tom’s instincts led him to fall very easily into his place in the domestic world. He was always a mere nut in a vast mechanism whose existence he dimly apprehended; he was of importance inasmuch as the great machinery might go out of gear for want of the trustworthy service of the least of its parts. Anne thought of herself--so far as she thought at all--as a spark from a divine fire, sent to illumine the musty darkness in which parents, domestic servants, visitors, and tradesmen had hitherto lived. This divine spark must be kept alive. She encouraged us all to blow, and herself pirouetted helpfully in the draught of our exertions. Nurse never devised things for the children to do, any more than the nervous system of the body devises occupations for the other parts. I understand that it allows some activities to pass unnoticed, inhibits others, and encourages some, but it does not suggest much. We all had our work to do, and when nurse was out of order, whether through ill-health or disapproval, strange distempers appeared in our conduct. Tom and Anne quarrelled. Ruth took to sending up twice a week “that sloppy hotpot which I can’t think is good for the children.” Clara left the clean things from the wash downstairs, “getting in all the way of the dust, and I with the stockings yet to darn.” Even the fish surpassed itself in evil-doing. Of course it “never came,” we were used to that; but on these fatal occasions it was full of bones when it did come, and “had nothing on it.”