Christina told us stories about her all tea-time; she listened quietly as she munched buns. How when she saw the new baby she said, "Dash it all! why it's bald!" How one rainy day she was lost, and they found her with six of her village friends walking in a straight line down to the pond, barefooted and bareheaded and their mouths open, quacking, and to catch the rain-drops like ducks do. How she has done all the absurd things children do in books, such as aspinalling the cat--as if a cat ever stayed to be aspinalled!--and gunpowder into ovens, and frogs into boots, and hedgehogs into beds. (She says so, but I believe she put the clothes-brush, and Peter mistook it with his feet in the dark!) And once when a noted Socialist man had been staying there and rashly talked before her, she had given away the furniture. "She went solemnly down the village," said Christina, "making presents of the unearned increment in the shape of things she didn't want and I did. Missing tensions of sewing-machines and valves of cycles and stray door-knobs and other bits of rolling stock--all disappeared. When it came to the spare sugar-tongs and my best silver scissors, however, I had to scold her. Oh, she'll be a great actress some day." We listened, and I am sure no one could tell from my face how I disapproved of it all,--unless Duse the second, who, after all, was a child too, twigged how ridiculous they were making her look? Anyhow, after she had made three usual scenes and one extraordinary one because we were there, and had been noisily taken off to bed, they left off discussing her and took up a perfectly safe subject; "shoots" and who to have. Christina teases, she always did, even in the days when she used to put us head first down rabbit-holes. "Has he a wife?" she asks, whenever Peter proposes a man. "My dear, I haven't the slightest idea. All I know is he is a capital shot, and brings down his pheasants in good style!" "These good shots bring down such bad wives--I mean from the house-party point of view," she says. "To look at their choice, they would always seem to have fired recklessly into the brown and got pot luck. You see I am boxed up with your friends' bad shots all day. I can't possibly make my housewifely duties last all the morning, and I object to have Jane brought down in her best frock and her worst behaviour to make sport for idle women. And she hates grown-up ladies, and has the wit to come in with segments of the Wanny Crag on her boots and her hair full of straws, so as to be sent out of the drawing-room to 'muck herself up.'" "I don't like that phrase, Christina!" "Don't be so aggressively pure, Peter!"