“She married who?” for the third time urged Hocker.
Hocker was strong, and the tears were forcing themselves into my eyes in
spite of me. So the Princess in return for healing the Dragon made it
promise to reform. It went back with her to the Prince, and made itself
generally useful to both of them for the rest of the tour. And the
Prince took the Princess home with him and married her; and the Dragon
died and was buried. The others liked the story better, but I hated it;
and the wind sighed and died away.
The little crowd becomes the reading public, and Hocker grows into an
editor; he twists my arm in other ways. Some are brave, so the crowd
kicks them and scurries off to catch the four-fifteen. But most of us, I
fear, are slaves to Hocker. Then, after awhile, the wind grows sulky and
will not tell us stories any more, and we have to make them up out of our
own heads. Perhaps it is just as well. What were doors and windows made
for but to keep out the wind.
He is a dangerous fellow, this wandering Wind; he leads me astray. I was
talking about our architect.
He made a bad start, so far as Robina was concerned, by coming in at the
back-door. Robina, in a big apron, was washing up. He apologised for
having blundered into the kitchen, and offered to go out again and work
round to the front. Robina replied, with unnecessary severity as I
thought, that an architect, if anyone, might have known the difference
between the right side of a house and the wrong; but presumed that youth
and inexperience could always be pleaded as excuse for stupidity. I
cannot myself see why Robina should have been so much annoyed. Labour,
as Robina had been explaining to Veronica only a few hours before, exalts
a woman. In olden days, ladies—the highest in the land—were proud, not
ashamed, of their ability to perform domestic duties. This, later on, I
pointed out to Robina. Her answer was that in olden days you didn’t have
chits of boys going about, calling themselves architects, and opening
back-doors without knocking; or if they did knock, knocking so that
nobody on earth could hear them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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