close. But the latter generally wins--for a time.

I had passed the mutton stage and was weltering in warm rice pudding,
before I found leisure to pause and take in things generally; and then a
glance in the direction of the window told me, to my dismay, that it was
raining hard. This was annoying in every way, for, even if it cleared
up later, the worms--I knew well from experience--would be offensively
numerous and frisky. Sulkily I said grace and accompanied the others
upstairs to the schoolroom; where I got out my paint-box and resolved
to devote myself seriously to Art, which of late I had much neglected.
Harold got hold of a sheet of paper and a pencil, retired to a table in
the corner, squared his elbows, and protruded his tongue. Literature had
always been his form of artistic expression.

Selina had a fit of the fidgets, bred of the unpromising weather, and,
instead of settling down to something on her own account, must needs
walk round and annoy us artists, intent on embodying our conceptions of
the ideal. She had been looking over my shoulder some minutes before I
knew of it; or I would have had a word or two to say upon the subject.

"I suppose you call that thing a ship," she remarked contemptuously.
"Who ever heard of a pink ship? Hoo-hoo!"

I stifled my wrath, knowing that in order to score properly it was
necessary to keep a cool head.

"There is a pink ship," I observed with forced calmness, "lying in
the toyshop window now. You can go and look at it if you like. D' you
suppose you know more about ships than the fellows who make 'em?"

Selina, baffled for the moment, returned to the charge presently.

"Those are funny things, too," she observed. "S'pose they 're meant to
be trees. But they're blue."

"They are trees," I replied with severity; "and they are blue. They've
got to be blue, 'cos you stole my gamboge last week, so I can't mix up
any green."

"Didn't steal your gamboge," declared Selina, haughtily, edging away,
however, in the direction of Harold. "And I wouldn't tell lies, either,
if I was you, about a dirty little bit of gainboge."

I preserved a discreet silence. After all, I knew she knew she stole my
gainboge.

The moment Harold became conscious of Selina's stealthy approach, he
dropped his pencil and flung himself flat upon the table, protecting
thus his literary efforts from chilling criticism by the interposed
thickness of his person. From some-where in his interior proceed