Myself, I liked the story, but Hocker, who was a Fifth Form boy, voicing our little public, said it was rot, so far, and that I had got to hurry up and finish things rightly.
“No, it isn’t,” said Hocker. “She’s got to marry the Prince in the end. He’ll have to kill the Dragon again; and mind he does it properly this time. Whoever heard of a Princess leaving a Prince for a Dragon!”
“But she wasn’t the ordinary sort of Princess,” I argued.
“Then she’s got to be,” criticised Hocker. “Don’t you give yourself so many airs. You make her marry the Prince, and be slippy about it. I’ve got to catch the four-fifteen from Chalk Farm station.”
“But she didn’t,” I persisted obstinately. “She married the Dragon and lived happy ever afterwards.”
Hocker adopted sterner measures. He seized my arm and twisted it behind me.
“She married who?” demanded Hocker: grammar was not Hocker’s strong point.
“She married who?” for the third time urged Hocker.
Hocker was strong, and the tears were forcing themselves into my eyes in spite of me. So the Princess in return for healing the Dragon made it promise to reform. It went back with her to the Prince, and made itself generally useful to both of them for the rest of the tour. And the Prince took the Princess home with him and married her; and the Dragon died and was buried. The others liked the story better, but I hated it; and the wind sighed and died away.
The little crowd becomes the reading public, and Hocker grows into an editor; he twists my arm in other ways. Some are brave, so the crowd kicks them and scurries off to catch the four-fifteen. But most of us, I fear, are slaves to Hocker. Then, after awhile, the wind grows sulky and will not tell us stories any more, and we have to make them up out of our own heads. Perhaps it is just as well. What were doors and windows made for but to keep out the wind.
He is a dangerous fellow, this wandering Wind; he leads me astray. I was talking about our architect.
He made a bad start, so far as Robina was concerned, by coming in at the back-door. Robina, in a big apron, was washing up. He apologised for having blundered into the kitchen, and offered to go out again and work round to the front. Robina replied, with unnecessary severity as I thought, that an architect, if anyone, might have known the difference between the right side of a house and the wrong; but presumed that youth and inexperience could always be pleaded as excuse for stupidity. I cannot myself see why Robina should have been so much annoyed. Labour, as Robina had been explaining to Veronica only a few hours before, exalts a woman. In olden days, ladies—the highest in the land—were proud, not ashamed, of their ability to perform domestic duties. This, later on, I pointed out to Robina. Her answer was that in olden days you didn’t have chits of boys going about, calling themselves architects, and opening back-doors without knocking; or if they did knock, knocking so that nobody on earth could hear them.