lly have done that faun's right leg so very badly--it's
getting a bad dream to me.'

Her voice died away drowsily. The brush slipped from her hand down among
the piled contents of the chair; she yawned softly and fell asleep, her
hair hanging in two dark, unbrushed strands over either shoulder, her
cheek pillowed on one thin, scarred, childish hand. It was a curious
scar, crossing the back of her left hand, a white diagonal, drawn from
the knuckle of the fore-finger nearly to the wrist-bone.

Tommy, his face turned complacently ceilingwards, fell asleep too. He
was very tired. They were both very tired. Betty's assertion that it had
not been a particularly busy day was doubtless correct, using the word
busy in its accepted sense. But, as Tommy had said, there seemed anyhow
to have been a good deal to do. There was usually for the Crevequers a
good deal to do, because, though they only at times and reluctantly
conformed to the law that those who would eat must work, they did
homage, thorough and without reservation, to the much more insistent
command of their being, that those who would live life as it should be
lived must make of it an exciting game, the object being to cram into
the space of each twenty-four hours as many amusements as could by
straining be confined therein. The number of points thus possible to
score each day they had discovered to be large; the chances they did
not devise for themselves by the ingenuity of their wits were devised
for them by affectionate acquaintances (the Crevequers were very
popular). They might be said, in fact, thoroughly to understand the art
of living; to understand, rather, one aspect of it--that which is
concerned with the receipt of pleasure. Their lack of means, though
deplored by them, did not very seriously incommode them. It only meant,
after all, that one had to practise a certain selection, and one could
select the right things, meaning thereby life's pleasing superfluities,
and leave the necessities to take care of themselves. The necessities
did not invariably take care of themselves; the Crevequers were
sometimes in winter cold (they liked immensely and above most things to
be warm), and sometimes remained hungry during a longer period than
seemed good to them, and were very often weary of foot, and usually
without the clothes they would have liked (mildly) to have been wearing.
But these times balanced themselves by occasional periods of luxury and
riotous living,