Taking her sister’s bland smile for ratification and agreement, Mary would set about her personification, shed her apron lest its damaged appearance convict her in older eyes, and speed toward her goal.  But the mad bull’s shrieks of protest and repudiation would startle every bit of chivalry for miles and miles around.

Several experiences of this nature taught Mary, that, in dealing with infants of changeable and rudimentary mind, honesty was an impossible policy and candor a very boomerang, which returned and smote one with savage force.  So she stooped to guile and detested the flannel all the more deeply because of the state to which it was debasing an upright conscience and a high sense of honor.

At first her lapses from the right were all negative.  She neglected the gift of God.  She would abandon it, always in a safe and shady spot and always with its covers smoothly tucked in, its wabbly parasol adjusted at the proper angle, and always with a large piece of wood tied to the perambulator’s handle by a labyrinth of elastic strings.  These Mary had drawn from abandoned garters, sling shots, and other mysterious sources, and they allowed the wood to jerk unsteadily up and down, and to soothe the unsuspecting Theodora with a spasmodic rhythm very like the ministrations of her preoccupied nurse.

Meanwhile the nurse would be far afield upon her own concerns, and Theodora was never one of them.  The river, the lane, the tall hickory knew her again and again.  Camelot shone out across the miles of hill and tree and valley.  But the river was silent and the lane empty, and Camelot seemed very far as autumn cleared the air.  Perhaps this was because knights and ladies manifest themselves only to the pure of heart.  Perhaps because Mary was always either consciously or subconsciously listening for the recalling shrieks of the abandoned and disprized gift of God.

“Stop it, I tell you,” she admonished her purple-faced and convulsive charge one afternoon when all the world was gold.  “Stop it, or mamma will be coming after us, and making us stay on the back porch.”  But Theodora, in the boastfulness of her new lungs, yelled uninterruptedly on.  Then did Mary try cajolery.  She removed her sister from the perambulator and staggered back in a sitting posture with suddenness and force.  The jar gave Theodora pause, and Mary crammed the silence full of promise.  “If you’ll stop yellin’ now I’ll see that my prince husband lets you be a goose-girl on the hills behind our palace.  Its awful nice being a goose-girl,” she hastened to add lest the prospect fail to charm.  “If I didn’t have to marry that prince an’ be a queen I guess I’d been a goose-girl myself.  Yes, sir, it’s lovely work on the hills behind a palace with all the knights ridin’ by an’ sayin’, ’Fair maid, did’st see a boar pass by this way?’ You don’t have to be afraid—­you’d never have to see one.  In all the books the goose-girls didn’t never see no boars, and the knights gave ’em a piece of gold an’ smiled on ’em, and the sunshine shined on ’em, an’ they had a lovely time.”