He assured her that he never thought her idiotic--at least not unintentionally--and went on to obtain the famous pledge--the promise that she would keep the governess he sent her until his return in September. She agreed finally, partly because it was getting late and she was sleepy, partly because she reflected that there were more ways of getting rid of governesses than by sending them away. "I'm so sleepy," she said, yawning, "and yet I don't quite like to go to bed until Antonia comes in." "Antonia?" said Wood. "I thought she went to bed at nine." It appeared that Antonia had formed the habit lately of sleeping on the beach--at least for the earlier part of the night--just digging a hole and curling up there. Her mother thought it an interesting, primitive, healthy sort of instinct. "And yet," she added thoughtfully, as if she knew she were a little finicky, "I don't like to lock up the house until she comes in." "I think you're right," said her brother. These were the things that terrified him so--a little girl out in the blackness of that beach in her pajamas. How could he go to Mexico and leave her? He rose and went to the edge of the piazza, which rested on the dunes. He could see nothing but the stars. "Shall I call her?" he said. "I hate to wake her; but--yes, just give a call." He shouted, and in a few seconds a faint, cheerful hullo reached them, and a little figure appeared over the dunes. "Were you asleep, darling?" said her mother. "No, I was swimming," said Antonia. She stepped within the circle of light from the windows, and Wood could see that her dark curly hair was plastered to her head, and her pajamas clung to her like tissue paper. "I love to swim at night," she said. "It makes you feel like a spirit." She shared her more important thoughts with her uncle. Then, turning to her mother, she advanced toward her with outstretched arms as if to clasp her in a wet embrace. "Look out for your mother's dress," said Wood, for Edna Conway was as usual perfectly dressed in white. She smiled at him and took the child to her breast. "Dear Anthony," she said, "if you were married you'd know that a woman loves her children better than her clothes." He was silent, wondering if she knew how much she had had to do with the fact that he wasn't married. He had no taste for masculine women, and yet Edna had made him distrustful of all femininity which sooner or later developed the sweet obstinacy, the clinging pig-headedness, the subtle ability, under the idiotic coyness of a kitten, to get its own way. Well off and physically attractive, he had not been neglected by women, but always sooner or later it had seemed to him that he had seen the dread shadow of kittenishness. Cattishness he could have borne, but the kitten in woman disgusted him. "And, dearest," his sister was saying to her daughter, "you won't go to bed in your wet things, will you?" Antonia shook her finger at her mother.