"I've shoved her away once or twice," said Henry. "But I expect the people here before us used to give her a saucer of milk sometimes. The best way would be to go out one afternoon and tell her to light the geyser. Then perhaps when we came back she'd be gone for good." Nevertheless, Mrs. Bullwinkle was of some service to Sylvia, for one day, when she was sadly washing down the main staircase of the house, she looked up from her handiwork and asked Sylvia, who was passing at the moment, if she would like some books to read, inviting her down-stairs to take her choice. "Mr. Bullwinkle used to be a big reader," the charwoman said. "A very big reader. A very big reader indeed he used to be, did Mr. Bullwinkle. In those days he was caretaker at a Congregational chapel in Gospel Oak, and he used to say that reading took his mind off of religion a bit. Otherwise he'd have gone mad before he did, which was shortly after he left the chapel through an argument he had with Pastor Phillips, who wrote his name in the dust on the reading-desk, which upset my old man, because he thought it wasn't all a straightforward way of telling him that his services wasn't considered satisfactory. Yes," said Mrs. Bullwinkle, with a stertorous sniff, "he died in Bedlam, did my old man. He had a very queer mania; he thought he was inside out, and it preyed on his mind. He wouldn't never have been shut up at all if he hadn't of always been undressing himself in the street and putting on his trousers inside out to suit his complaint. They had to feed him with a chube in the end, because he would have it his mouth couldn't be got at through him being inside out. Queer fancies some people has, don't they? Oh, well, if we was all the same, it would be a dull world I suppose." Sylvia sat up in the big garret and read through one after another of the late Mr. Bullwinkle's tattered and heterogeneous collection. She did not understand all she read; but there were few books that did not give her on one page a vivid impression, which she used to elaborate with her imagination into something that was really a more substantial experience than the book itself. The days grew longer and more sunny, and Sylvia dreamed them away, reading and thinking and watching from her window the little girls pirouette in the shadowy room opposite. Her hair was quite long now, a warm brown with many glinting strands. In the summer Jimmy and Henry made a good deal of money by selling a number of tickets for a non-existent stand in one of the best positions on the route of the Diamond Jubilee procession; indeed they felt prosperous enough to buy for themselves and Sylvia seats in a genuine stand. Sylvia enjoyed the pageant, which seemed more like something out of a book than anything in real life. She took advantage of the temporary prosperity to ask for money to buy herself new clothes.