‘Nobody asks you to rave, Linda,’ said the old woman, sadly.

‘Don't they?’ Linda screwed up her eyes. ‘I'm not so sure. If I were to jump out of bed now, fling on my clothes, rush downstairs, tear up a ladder, hang pictures, eat an enormous lunch, romp with the children in the garden this afternoon, and be swinging on the gate, waving, when Stanley hove in sight this evening, I believe you'd be delighted. A normal, healthy day for a young wife and mother. A …'

Mrs. Fairfield began to smile. ‘How absurd you are! How you exaggerate! What a baby you are,’ said she.

But Linda sat up suddenly and jerked off the woolly.

‘I'm boiling. I'm roasting,’ she declared. ‘I can't think what I'm doing in this big, stuffy old bed. I'm going to get up.'

‘Very well, dear,’ said Mrs. Fairfield.

Getting dressed never took her long. Her hands flew. She had beautiful hands, white and tiny. The only trouble with them was that they could not keep her rings on them. Happily she only had two rings: her wedding ring and a peculiarly hideous affair, a square slab with four pin opals in it that Stanleyhad 'stolen from a cracker,’ said Linda, the day they were engaged. But it was her wedding ring that disappeared so. It fell down every possible place and into every possible corner. Once she even found it in the crown of her hat. It was a familiar cry in the house: ‘Linda's wedding ring has gone again.'

Stanley Burnell could never hear that without horrible sense of discomfort. Good Lord. He wasn't superstitious. He left that kind of rot to people who had nothing better to think about—but all the same it was devilishly annoying. Especially as Linda made so light of the affair and mocked him and said, ‘Are they as expensive as all that?’ and laughed at him and cried, holding up her bare hand—'Look, Stanley, it has all been a dream.’ He was a fool to mind things like that, but they hurt him—they hurt like sin.

‘Funny I should have dreamed about Papa last night,’ thought Linda, brushing her cropped hair that stood up all over her head in little bronzy rings. ‘What was it I dreamed?’ No, she'd forgotten—'something or other about a bird.’ But Papa was very plain—his lazy, ambling walk. And she laid dowrn the brush and went over to the mantelpiece and leaned her arms along it, her chin in her hands, and looked at his photograph. In his photograph he showed severe and imposing, a high brow, a piercing eye, clean shaven except for long ‘piccadilly weepers’ draping his bosom. He was taken in the fashion of that time, standing, one arm on the back of a tapestry chair, the other clenched upon a parchment roll.

‘Papa!’ said Linda. She smiled. ‘There you are, my dear,’ she breathed, and then she shook her head quickly and frowned, and went on with her dressing.

Her father had died the year that she married Burnell, the year of her sixteenth birthday. All her childhood had been passed in a long white house perched on a hill overlooking Wellington harbour—a house with a wild garden full of bushes and fruit trees, long thick grass and nasturtiums. Nasturtiums grew everywhere—there was no fighting them down. They even fell in a shower over the paling fence on to the road. Red, yellow, white, every possible colour; they lighted the garden like swarms of butterflies. The Fairfields were a large family of boys and girls; with their beautiful mother and their gay, fascinating father (for it was only in his photograph that he looked stern) they were quite a ‘show’ family and immensely admired.

Mr. Fairfield managed a small insurance business that could not have been very profitable, yet they lived plentifully. He had a good voice; he liked to sing in public, he liked to dance and attend picnics, to put on his ‘bell topper’ and walk out of Church if he disapproved of anything said in the sermon, and he had a passion for inventing highly impracticable things, like collapsible umbrellas or folding lamps. He had one saying with which he met all difficulties. ‘Depend upon it, it will all come right after the Maori war.’ Linda, his second but youngest child, was his darling, his pet, his playfellow. She was a wild thing, always trembling on the verge of laughter, ready for anything and eager. When he put his arm round her and held her he felt her thrilling with life. He understood her so beautifully and gave her so much love for love that he became a kind of daily miracle to her, and all her faith centred in him. People barely touched her; she was regarded as a cold, heartless little creature, but sheseemed to have an unlimited passion for that violent sweet thing called life—just being alive and able to run and climb and swim in the sea and lie in the grass. In the evenings she and her Father would sit on the verandah—she on his knee—and ‘plan.'

‘When I am grown up we shall travel every—where—we shall see the whole world—won't we, Papa?'

‘We shall, my dear.'

‘One of your inventions will have a great success. Bring you in a good round million yearly.'

‘We can manage on that.'

‘But one day we shall be rich, and the next poor. One day we shall dine in a palace and the next we'll sit in a forest and toast mushrooms on a hatpin…. We shall have a little boat—we shall explore the interior of China on a raft—you will look sweet in one of those huge umbrella hats that Chinamen wear in pictures. We won't leave a corner of anywhere unexplored—shall we?'

‘We shall look under the beds and in all the cupboards and behind every curtain.'

‘And we shan't go as father and daughter,’ she tugged at his ‘piccadilly weepers’ and began kissing him. ‘We'll just go as a couple of boys together—Papa.'

By the time Linda was fourteen, the big family had vanished; only she and Beryl, who was two years younger, were left. The girls had married; the boys had gone away. Linda left off attending the Select Academy for Young Ladies presided over by Miss Clara Finetta Birch (from England), a lady whose black hair lay so flat on her head that everybody said it was only painted on, and she stayed at home to be a help to her mother. For three days she laid the table and took the mending basket on to the verandah in the afternoon, but after that she ‘went mad-dog again,’ as her father expressed it, and there was no holding her.

‘Oh, Mother, life is so fearfully short,' said Linda.

That summer Burnell appeared. Every evening a stout young man in a striped shirt, with fiery red hair, and a pair of immature mutton chop whiskers, passed their house, quite slowly, four times. Twice up the hill he went, and twice down he came. He walked with his hands behind his back, and each time he glanced once at the verandah where they sat—Who was he? None of them knew—but he became a great joke.

‘Here she blows,’ Mr. Fairfield would whisper. The young man came to be called the ‘ginger whale.’ Then he appeared at Church, in a pew facing theirs, very devout and serious. But he had that unfortunate complexion that goes with his colouring, and every time he so much as glanced in Linda's direction a crimson blush spread over his face to his ears.

‘Look out, my wench,’ said Mr. Fairfield. ‘Your clever Papa has solved the problem. That young fellow is after you.'

‘Henry! What rubbish. How can you say such things,’ said his wife.

‘There are times,’ said Linda, ‘when I simply doubt your sanity, Papa.’ But Beryl loved the idea. The ‘ginger whale’ became ‘Linda's beau'.

‘You know as well as I do that I am never going to marry,’ said Linda. ‘How can you be such a traitor, Papa?'

A Social given by the Liberal Ladies’ Political League ripened matters a little. Linda and her Papa attended. She wore a green sprigged muslin with little capes on the shoulders that stood up like wings, and he wore a frock coat and a wired buttonhole as big as a soup plate. The Social began with a very painful concert.

‘She wore a Wreath of Roses'—'They played in the Beautiful Garden'—'A Mother sat Watching'—'Flee as a Bird to the Mountain'—sang the political ladies with forlorn and awful vigour. The gentlemen sang with far greater vigour and a kind of defiant cheerfulness which was almost terrifying. They looked very furious, too. Their cuffs shot over their hands, or their trousers were far too long … Comic recitations about flies on bald heads and engaged couples sitting on porch steps spread with glue werecontributed by the chemist. Followed an extraordinary meal, called upon the hand-printed programme Tea and Coffee, and consisting of ham-beef-or-tongue, tinned salmon, oyster patties, sandwiches, col’ meat, jellies, huge cakes, fruit salads in wash-hand bowls, trifles bristling with almonds, and large cups of tea, dark brown in colour, tasting faintly of rust. Helping Linda to a horrible-looking pink blancmange, which he said was made of strangled baby's head, her father whispered: ‘The ginger whale is here. I've just spotted him blushing at a sandwich. Look out, my lass. He'll sandbag you with one of old Ma Warren's rock cakes.'

Away went the plates—away went the tables. Young Mr. Fantail, in evening clothes with brown button boots, sat down at the piano, and crashed into the ‘Lancers.'

And half way through the ‘evening’ it actually came to pass. Smoothing his white cotton gloves—a beetroot was pale compared to him; a pillar box was a tender pink—Burnell asked Linda for the pleasure, and before she realised what had happened his arm was round her waist and they were turning round and round to the air of ‘Three Blind Mice’ (arranged by Mr. Fantail même).

He did not talk while he danced—but Linda liked that.

When the dance was over they sat on a bench against the wall. Linda hummed the valse tune and beat time with her glove; she felt dreadfully shy and she was terrified of her father's merry eye. At last Burnell turned to her.

‘Did you ever hear the story of the shy young man who went to his first ball? He danced with a girl and then they sat on the stairs and they could not think of a thing to say. And after he'd picked up everything she dropped from time to time, after the silence was simply unbearable, he turned round and stammered: “D-Do you always w-wear flannel next to the skin?” I feel rather like that chap,’ said Burnell.

Then she did not hear them any more. What a glare there was in the room. She hated blinds pulled up to the top at any time—but in the morning, in the morning especially! She turned over to the wall and idly, with one finger, she traced a poppy on the wallpaper with a leaf and a stem and a fat bursting bud. In the quiet, under her tracing finger, the poppy seemed to come alive. She could feel the sticky, silky petals, the stem, hairy like a gooseberry skin, the rough leaf and the tight glazed bud. Things had a habit of coming alive in the quiet; she had often noticed it. Not only large, substantial things, like furniture, but curtains and patterns of stuffs, and fringes of quilts and cushions. How often she had seen the tassel fringe of her quilt change into a funny procession of dancers, with priests attending … for there were some tassels that did not dance at all, but walked stately, bent forward as if praying or chanting. How often the medicine bottles had turned into a row of little men with brown top hats on. And often the washstand jug sat in the basin like a fat bird in a round nest.

‘I dreamed about birds last night,’ thought Linda. What was it? No, she'd forgotten…. But the strangest part about this coming alive of things was what they did. They listened; they seemed to swell out with some mysterious important content, and when they were full she felt that they smiled.