“‘Well, good-night, good-night, I won’t speak again really,--but you’ll come and kiss me, won’t you Moth’?’ “‘Is to-morrow football?’ “‘O, my lips are so sore!’ “‘And mine!’ “‘And mine!’ “‘What have you got on, Mummie?’ “‘What?’ “‘O, your _yellow_. Well, good-night, boys!’ “‘When do we go on our expedition?’ “‘Oh! it’s _soup_.’ “‘I’ve got a flea-bite.’ “‘Have you? Where?’ “‘Will somebody brush the crumbs out?’ “And so on, indefinitely. How she stands it I can’t imagine, but there is peace at last. And then it’s the turn of the other children; but I’ll say this for them, they make very little noise.” “What other children?” asked Clare, with a sense of growing excitement, “do you mean----” “I mean the picture children of course, child. Leslie, Beppo, Collina, and the little Spencers. You interrupt me as callously as you do your poor Mother. My next novel shall be concerned with the amazing difference in the up-bringing of children, then and now. But how different it all is to Grosvenor Square!” This caught Clare’s fancy. She loved people to criticise and draw comparisons. “O, what?” she said. “Is it different? Of course I know it is, but do tell me, don’t you like it? And did you like Grosvenor Square?” “They knew how to live there,” said Mrs. Inchbald severely: “everything was in order, my dear. There was a butler, with all the punctuality of a heavenly body surrounded by his satellites, the footmen, who could be thoroughly depended on to keep up the fires....” “Yes, even in the very warmest weather, Mother says. She doesn’t like footmen, you know, except in palaces; she’d rather men were soldiers, or ploughed fields. She doesn’t like to see them hand plates about, which women do far more prettily; besides, men stamp so, and blow down your back.” “Perhaps the furniture,” continued Mrs. Inchbald, regardless of interruption, “perhaps the furniture was unsuited to child-life, holding the priceless china as it did ... the move was certainly courageous. But O, how we were loved!” Something in Mrs. Inchbald’s voice made Clare listen. She liked her better now that her hard face softened so.