THIS was all very well, but the paper was not written, and, what was more, it had to be. With awful inevitableness the day when it must be finished was approaching.
"What ails me?" thought Alice. "Are my nerves so frail that I can't do this thing unless I live in a vacuum?"
Now she had a new plan. A word dropped by Tom gave it to her.
"Telling them to, is no way to keep children quiet," he said; "if I had a few minutes more time I would have got them something they really wanted to do. But, of course, as you wanted to finish writing right away, I just had to sit on the lid."
Alice inquired separately of each one of her children what they would rather do than anything else in the world.
What Robert wanted to do was simple. There was nothing the matter with it except that it was not a thing that Alice had ever allowed, and that in allowing it once she would have permitted that thing feared so by her mother-in-law, the Entering Wedge. She knew that by permitting it she was bringing on her head arguments without limit, "Whys" without number to be answered. What Robert wanted to do was to go to the movies alone. Alice did not approve of the afternoon movies with all the children in town cooped up in an inflammable, germ-laden, unventilated Black Hole of Calcutta, as she de-
