really like her children she presently realized
when in the feeble irascibility of their sickness they fell quarrelling.
They became--horrid. Millicent and Annette being imprisoned in their
beds it seemed good to Florence when she came back from the morning's
walk, to annex and hide a selection of their best toys. She didn't take
them and play with them, she hid them with an industrious earnestness in
a box window-seat that was regarded as peculiarly hers, staggering with
armfuls across the nursery floor. Then Millicent by some equally
mysterious agency divined what was afoot and set up a clamour for a
valued set of doll's furniture, which immediately provoked a similar
outcry from little Annette for her Teddy Bear. Followed woe and uproar.
The invalids insisted upon having every single toy they possessed
brought in and put upon their beds; Florence was first disingenuous and
then surrendered her loot with passionate howlings. The Teddy Bear was
rescued from Baby after a violent struggle in which one furry hind leg
was nearly twisted off. It jars upon the philoprogenitive sentiment of
our time to tell of these things and still more to record that all four,
stirred by possessive passion to the profoundest depths of their beings,
betrayed to an unprecedented degree in their little sharp noses, their
flushed faces, their earnest eyes, their dutiful likeness to Sir Isaac.
He peeped from under Millicent's daintily knitted brows and gestured
with Florence's dimpled fists. It was as if God had tried to make him
into four cherubim and as if in spite of everything he was working
through.

Lady Harman toiled to pacify these disorders, gently, attentively, and
with a faint dismay in her dark eyes. She bribed and entreated and
marvelled at mental textures so unlike her own. Baby was squared with a
brand new Teddy Bear, a rare sort, a white one, which Snagsby went and
purchased in the Putney High Street and brought home in his arms,
conferring such a lustre upon the deed that the lower orders, the very
street-boys, watched him with reverence as he passed. Annette went to
sleep amidst a discomfort of small treasures and woke stormily when Mrs.
Harblow tried to remove some of the spikier ones. And Lady Harman went
back to her large pink bedroom and meditated for a long time upon these
things and tried to remember whether in her own less crowded childhood
with Georgina, either of them had been quite so inhumanly hard and
grasping as t