... I looked up at the blue, glad that I was so near to it, and thought how much pleasanter it would be to fly right away through the blue and see what colour it was lined with. Pink, maybe--rose-pink, which showed through at sunset when the sun leaped at last through the blue and it closed behind him. Rose-pink, like my best sash and hair-ribbons.... That brought me back. My best sash and hair-ribbons were in my top drawer. Moreover, there were foot-steps on the stairs and at the very door. “Have you finished?” Mother asked. I had not even opened the drawer. “You have been up here one hour,” Mother said, and came and stood beside me. “What have you been doing?” I began to tell her. I do not envy her her quandary. She knew that I was not to be too heavily chided and yet--the top drawers of this world must be tidied. “Think!” she said. “That Hour has gone out the window without its work being done. And now this Hour, that was meant for play, has got to work. But not you! You’ve lost your turn. Now it’s Mother’s turn.” She made me sit by the window while she tidied the drawer. I was not to touch it--I had lost my turn. While she worked, she talked to me about the things she knew I liked to talk about. But I could not listen. It is the only time in my life that I have ever really frantically wanted to tidy a top bureau drawer of anybody’s. “Now,” she said when she had done, “this last Hour will meet the Hour-before-the-last, and each of them will look the way the other ought to have looked, and they will be all mixed up. And all day I think they will keep trying to come back to you to straighten them out. But you can’t do it. And they’ll have to be each other forever and ever and ever.” She went away again, and I was left face to face with the very heart of this whole perplexing Time business: those two Hours that would always be somewhere trying to be each other, forever and ever, and always trying to come back for me to straighten them out. Were there Hours out in the world that were sick hours, sick because we had treated them badly, and always trying to come back for folk to make them well? And were there Hours that were busy and happy somewhere because they had been well used and they didn’t have to try to come back for us to patch them up? Were Hours like that? Was Time like that? When I told Delia of the incident, she at once characteristically settled it. “Why, if they wasn’t any time,” she said, “we’d all just wait and wait and wait. They couldn’t have that. So they set something going to get us going to keep things going.”