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“What does this mean?” asked Jill, grabbing me in the hall on our way to bed.

“You’d better get another novel from the cook and find out,” I said grouchily. I was disgusted with things in general and Dick in particular.

The three weeks that followed were awful. Dick never came near Owlwood. Jill and I fought every day, we were so cross and disappointed. Nothing had come out right, and Jill blamed it all on me. She said I must have made it too strong. There was no fun in anything, not even in going to church. Dick hardly thumped the pulpit at all and when he did it was only a measly little thump. But Aunt Tommy didn’t seem to worry any. She sang and laughed and joked from morning to night.

“She doesn’t mind Dick’s making an ass of himself, anyway, that’s one consolation,” I said to Jill.

“She is breaking her heart about it,” said Jill, “and that’s your consolation!”

“I don’t believe it,” I said. “What makes you think so?”

“She cries every night,” said Jill. “I can tell by the look of her eyes in the morning.”

“She doesn’t look half as woebegone over it as you do,” I said.

“If I had her reason for looking woebegone I wouldn’t look it either,” said Jill.

I asked her to explain her meaning, but she only said that little boys couldn’t understand those things.

Things went on like this for another week. Then they reached–so Jill says–a climax. If Jill knows what that means I don’t. But Pinky Carewe was the climax. Pinky’s name is James, but Jill and I always called him Pinky because we couldn’t bear him. He took to calling at Owlwood and one evening he took Aunt Tommy out driving. Then Jill came to me.

“Something has got to be done,” she said resolutely. “I am not going to have Pinky Carewe for an Uncle Tommy and that is all there is about it. You must go straight to Dick and tell him the truth about the New York man.”

I looked at Jill to see if she were in earnest. When I saw that she was I said, “I wouldn’t take all the gems of Golconda and go and tell Dick that I’d been hoaxing him. You can do it yourself, Jill Gordon.”

“You didn’t tell him anything that wasn’t true,” said Jill.

“I don’t know how a minister might look upon it,” I said. “Anyway, I won’t go.”

“Then I suppose I’ve got to,” said Jill very dolefully.

“Yes, you’ll have to,” I said.

And this finishes my part of the story, and Jill is going to tell the rest. But you needn’t believe everything she says about me in it.

Jill’s Side of It

Jacky has made a fearful muddle of his part, but I suppose I shall just have to let it go. You couldn’t expect much better of a boy. But I am determined to re-describe Aunt Tommy, for the way Jacky has done it is just disgraceful. I know exactly how to do it, the way it is always done in stories.

Aunt Tommy is divinely beautiful. Her magnificent wealth of burnished auburn hair flows back in amethystine waves from her sun-kissed brow. Her eyes are gloriously dark and deep, like midnight lakes mirroring the stars of heaven; her features are like sculptured marble and her mouth is like a trembling, curving Cupid’s bow (this is a classical allusion) luscious and glowing as a dewy rose. Her creamy skin is as fair and flawless as the inner petals of a white lily. (She may have a weeny teeny freckle or two in summer, but you’d never notice.) Her slender form is matchless in its symmetry and her voice is like the ripple of a woodland brook.

There, I’m sure that’s ever so much better than Jacky’s description, and now I can proceed with a clear conscience.

Well, I didn’t like the idea of going and explaining to Dick very much, but it had to be done unless I wanted to run the risk of having Pinky Carewe in the family. So I went the next morning.