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"I thought," I said, "and hoped that there might have been something in it about the effect the stuff had on Tom Kitterick. I have never been able to find out anything about that." "It didn't do much to Tom Kitterick," said Lalage. "He was just as turkey eggy afterward as he was before.
Make Tom Kitterick carry them over to Thormanby Park and present them on bended knee, clad only in his shirt and with a halter round his neck." The Canon's gloom merely deepened. "I don't think," I said, "that you need fret about Miss Pettigrew. After all, it's her job. She must meet plenty of high-spirited girls." "I wasn't thinking of her," said the Canon.
"I have a lot of letters to write," she said. "I'm not sure I can write to you." "Try. I particularly want to know what Miss Pettigrew thinks of your English composition. I should mark you high for it myself." "I have to write to father every week, and I've promised to answer Tom Kitterick when he lets me know how the new pigs are getting on." "Still you might manage a line to me in between.
She didn't try to flirt with Tom Kitterick, did she?" "It's all the same thing really," said the Canon. "The confinement and discipline will be just as severe on her as they were on that girl of Horace's, though, of course, they will take a different form. She's been accustomed to a good deal of freedom and independence." "According to the Archdeacon," I said, "to more than was good for her."
"Lalage tried the stuff on Tom Kitterick, I suppose." "Yes. She used the whole bottle, and Miss Battersby found out what had happened and complained to me. She was extremely nice about it, but she said that the incident had made her position as Lalage's governess quite impossible." "Lalage, of course, smiled balmily." "Calmly," said the Canon.
It was Tom Kitterick who put it there, and I helped him. Tom Kitterick is the boy who cleans the boots and pumps the water. It was that time," she added, "that I got paint all over my blue dress. She said it was Tom Kitterick's fault." "It may have been," I said, "partly. Anyhow Tom Kitterick is a red-haired, freckly youth. It wouldn't do him any harm to be slanged a bit for something."
"The other honourable citizen," I said, "is Tom Kitterick, I suppose." "No," said Lalage. "There was only me, but that's the way editors always talk. Father told me so once. 'Yet she did it. She sneaked. Yes, sneaked to the grown-up society, complained, as the now extinct Tommy used to do." "The allusion," I said, "escapes me. Who was the now extinct Tommy?" "The one before the Cat," said Lalage.
It was breakfast time and we were eating fish " "Trout," said the Canon. "I remember the morning perfectly. Tom Kitterick caught them the day before. I took him out with me. The Archdeacon had been over to see me." "Laying down my fork," Lalage went on, "I said to no one in particular " "Excuse me, Lalage," I said, "but is this a quotation from the last number of the Anti-Cat?" "It is.
It didn't even smart, though I rubbed it in for nearly half an hour, and Tom Kitterick said I'd have the skin off his face, which just shows the silly sort of stuff it was. Not that I'd expect the Cat to have anything else except silly stuff. That's the kind she is. Anybody would know it by simply looking at her. Father, I don't believe you've got my ticket. Hadn't you better go and see about it?"
Even Miss Battersby, who must know more about girls than any bishop, felt that Lalage had lost something not to be regained when she became intimate enough with Tom Kitterick to rub glycerine and cucumber into his cheeks. Lalage was, in my opinion, herself guilty of something very like the sin of tommyrot when she mocked another bishop for a sermon he had preached on "Empire Day."
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