Mary was very mistrustful, and Aunt Phyllis had to expostulate with her. “You see, Mary, it seems she’s the children’s guardian just as we are. They _must_ see a little of her....”
“And _ha-ow’s_ Peter?” said Lady Charlotte.
“Very well, thank you, Lady Charlotte,” said Mary.
“Very well, thank you lazy Cha’lot,” said Peter.
“That’s right. We shall soon get along Famously. And how’s my little Joan?”
“Pee-Bo!” said Lady Charlotte tremendously, and craned her head.
Peter regarded the lady incredulously. He wanted to ask a question about the whisker. But something in Mary’s grip upon his wrist warned him not to do that. In this world, he remembered suddenly, there are Unspeakable Things. Perhaps this was one of them.... That made it all the more fascinating, of course.
Lady Charlotte was shown the nursery; she stayed to nursery tea. She admired everything loudly.
“And so these are your Toys, lucky Peter. Do you play with them all?”
“Such a Pretty Room!” said Lady Charlotte with gestures of approval. “Such a Pretty Outlook. I wonder you didn’t make it the Drawing-Room. Isn’t it a pretty room, Unwin?”
Very skilfully she made her first tentative towards the coup she had in mind.
“One day, Mary, you must bring them over to Tea with _me_,” she said....
“I do so want the dear children to come over to me,” she said presently in the garden to aunts Phyllis and Phœbe. “If they would come over quite informally—with their Mary. Just to Tea and scamper about the shrubbery....”
Mary and Unwin surveyed the garden conversation from the nursery window, and talked sourly and distrustfully.
The day of the great coup of Lady Charlotte was tragic and painful from the beginning. Peter got up wicked. It was his custom, and a very bad one, to bang with his spoon upon the bottom of his little porringer as he ate his porridge. It had grown out of his appreciation of the noise the spoon made as he dug up his food. Now, as Mary said, he “_d’librately ’ammered_.” How frequently had not Mary told him he would do it “once too often!” This was the once too often. The porridge plate cracked and broke, and the porridge and the milk and sugar escaped in horrid hot gouts and lumps over tablecloth and floor and Peter’s knees. It was a fearful mess. It was enough to cow the stoutest heart. Peter, a great boy of five, lifted up his voice and wept.