"Shows how careful you ought to be," he said. Then turning to Sylvia, he asked her what on earth she thought she was doing when she broke the window.
"Suppose you'd been collared by the police, you little fool. We should have got into a nice mess, thanks to you. Look here, in future you're not to speak to people in the street. Do you hear?"
Sylvia had no chestnuts left to throw at Jimmy, so in her rage she took an ornament from the mantelpiece and smashed it on the fender.
"You've got the breaking mania," said Henry. "You'd better spend the next money you've got on cocoanuts instead of chestnuts."
"_Oh, ta gueule!_ I'm not going to be a boy any longer."
While her hair was growing long again Sylvia developed a taste for reading. She had nothing else to do, for it was not to be supposed that with her head cropped close she could show herself to the world in petticoats. Her refusal any longer to wear male attire gave Monkley and her father an excuse to make one of their hurried moves from Kennington Park Road, where by this time they owed enough money to justify the trouble of evading payment. Henry had for some time expressed a desire to be more central; and a partially furnished top floor was found in Fitzroy Street, or, as the landlord preferred to call it, a self-contained and well-appointed flat. The top floor had certainly been separated from the rest of the house by a wooden partition and a door of its own, which possibly justified the first half of the description, but the good appointments were limited to a bath that looked like an old palette, and a geyser that was not always safe according to Mrs. Bullwinkle, a decrepit charwoman, left behind by the last tenants, together with some under-linen and two jars containing a morbid growth that may formerly have been pickles.
"How d'ye mean, not safe?" Henry asked. "Is it liable to blow up?"
"It went off with a big bang last April and hasn't been lit since," the charwoman said. "But perhaps it 'll be all right now. The worst of it is I never can remember which tap you put the match to."
"You leave it alone, old lady," Henry advised. "Nobody's likely to do much bathing in here; from what I can see of it that bath gives more than it gets. What did the last people use it for--growing watercress or keeping chickens?"