Grace would say that of course Aunt Lavvy loved them all alike. Grace was a fathead ... she talked of loving people alike as though it were a merit. And Nina would say----, “Oh, _sisters_!” Bunny, wet through with the drizzling rain, and thoroughly exasperated with things in general, tried to hurl his ball neatly into the open aperture of Nina’s window. It entered the room, certainly, but through the lower pane, not over it. “Damnation!” Bunny ran quickly into the house to recover his property. Once in the girls’ room, as it was still called, though Gracie had departed, he regretted that he had not brought up a fat toad he had noticed hopping in the mush of wet leaves outside, and promptly made an extra journey downstairs to fetch it. The room annoyed him with its spruce impersonal air, Nina’s cups and hockey-group photographs ranged all along the mantelpiece, as though she were a boy--as though she were Hal. “I do hope no rotten man will ever make old Nina still more pleased with herself by getting struck on her!”--with an apprehension of the awful calamity this would be. Bunny was quite busy and happy settling the toad in a temporary paradise of Nina’s wash-basin full to the brim with water, lifted unsteadily and set upon the carpet ... a surrounding tent of sheets pulled from Nina’s bed and draped over chairs and a tripod of golf-clubs. Gradually, from a mischievous schoolboy, he was metamorphosed into a child again, by the unfailing fun of building up things with any odd material at hand into an erection for which they were not intended ... a child absorbed and solemn, breathing rather hard, dark rings of hair fallen over his forehead ... a crooning commentary on his own action forming at last into a little song. “That’s right, tie them together.... Hi, young Toad, you stop where you are ... this is _home_ in the basin. I’ll get you some mud presently ... here’s the other sheet ... peg it down--shall I leave an archway? ... he’ll get out, though--books so that they don’t blow up from the floor ... that’s splendid.... The Toaderies.... Paint the sheets blue so that he thinks it’s the sky above him ... ink would do ... night sky.... Bother! it’s slipped again.... Where did I put that string? ... a cave of broken flowerpots....” “_Bunny!_” He came up with a drowned expression--the miscellaneous heap built up on the carpet of Nina’s room slipped away from the illusion of under-the-sea grottos of which he had been inspired architect, and was merely silliness--he waited for Nina to say so, knowing there was no escape.... Why had he lugged in that old toad? It was not even as though Nina were afraid of them; then, there would have been some sense in it. If Nina had been a proper girl----