“Well then, go and play.”

He went and to a heavenly place that he knew of.  But as he played with Himself there he thought:  “Auntie Emmy doesn’t tell the truth.  I think it is because she isn’t happy.”

Michael kept his best things to himself.

* * * * *

“I suppose you’re happy,” said Grannie, “now you’ve got the poor child sent away.”

Auntie Emmy raised her eyebrows and spread out her hands, as much as to say she was helpless under her mother’s stupidity.

“He’d have been sent away anyhow,” said Frances.  “It isn’t good for him to hang about listening to grown-up conversation.”

It was her part to keep the peace between her mother and her sisters.

“It seems to me,” said Auntie Louie, “that you began it yourself.”

When a situation became uncomfortable, Auntie Louie always put her word in and made it worse.  She never would let Frances keep the peace.

Frances knew what Louie meant—­that she was always flinging her babies in Emmy’s face at those moments when the sight of other people’s babies was too much for Emmy.  She could never be prepared for Emmy’s moments.

“It’s all very well,” Auntie Louie went on; “but I should like to hear of somebody admiring Dorothy.  I don’t see where Dorothy comes in.”

Dorothy was supposed, by the two Nannas, to be Auntie Louie’s favourite.  If you taxed her with it she was indignant and declared that she was sure she wasn’t.

And again Frances knew what Louie meant—­that she loved her three sons, Michael and Nicholas and John, with passion, and her one daughter, Dorothea, with critical affection.  That was the sort of thing that Louie was always saying and thinking about people, and nobody ever paid the slightest attention to what Louie said or thought.  Frances told herself that if there was one emotion that she was more free from than another it was sex jealousy.

The proof of it, which she offered now, was that she had given up Dorothy to Anthony.  It was natural that he should care most for the little girl.

Louie said that was easy—­when she knew perfectly well that Anthony didn’t.  Like Frances he cared most for his three sons.  She was leaving Dorothy to Anthony so that Anthony might leave Michael and Nicholas to her.

“You might just as well say,” Frances said, “that I’m in love with John-John.  Poor little Don-Don!”

“I might,” said Louie, “just as well.”

Grannie said she was sure she didn’t understand what they were talking about and that Louie had some very queer ideas in her head.

“Louie,” she said, “knows more than I do.”

Frances thought:  Was Grannie really stupid?  Was she really innocent?  Was she not, rather, clever, chock-full of the secret wisdom and the secret cruelty of sex?

Frances was afraid of her thoughts.  They came to her not like thoughts, but like quick rushes of her blood, partly confusing her.  She did not like that.