"Little silly, you've always been my little girl."
But Judy wouldn't hear of it, and shook her head till the curls flew.
When her grandmother questioned her about it, she would only repeat:
"It was another mummy under the big tree."
Millicent was convinced that she only said it to annoy.
Noel too had little peculiarities as a child. Loud music always hurt his eyes, he said, and when he heard a noisy brass band he would shut them tightly and cry out:
"It's hideous! It's so red. I hate that color."
He always saw color in music and heard music in color, and never knew that he was different from other people until he went to school, and there the boys teased him out of it. Think of the individual oddnesses that are strangled (for better or for worse) in school! Limbo must be full of childish conceits and strange gleams of knowledge.
On that particular afternoon the two of them amused their grandmother even more than usual. They had no secrets from Madame Claire, which of course is the greatest compliment the young can pay to the old.
The subject of Judy's spinsterhood was intro-
