“It just makes me feel like a king’s daughter,” she had once confided to Isolde, “and do you know, Godmother, I really think I like it better than the theatre, because there is no tiresome clapping to interrupt in the middle, and disturb one, and make one feel every-dayish again all of a sudden.”
“What would you like to do, little cushat?” asked Isolde, as the two strolled home together across the fields. “I have some letters that I must write, and I am afraid they will take me till lunch-time.”
“I will look at your Granny’s big picture Bible first,” said Philomène, “and then write to Daddy and play with the pussies, and after that I will go and have a look at the dove-cot.”
“There aren’t any doves, you know,” said Isolde, “I don’t particularly want to keep any. There are quite enough in the woods all round.”
“Oh, that doesn’t matter a bit,” said Philomène, “one can always pretend.”
So Godmother settled herself to write on the verandah, and Philomène brought out the Bible. It was a very bulky book, for it contained not only the Old and New Testaments, but the Old and New Testament Apocryphas as well. Judging from the dog’s-eared pages thereabouts, it would appear that Godmother’s Granny had looked oftenest at the picture of Jacob blessing his twelve sons from a four-poster bed, and at another of the Last Judgment, the grouping of which suggested nothing so much as a prize-giving. But Philomène preferred Martha, cumbered with a pepper-pot and a soup-tureen, because she reminded her of Lilian Augusta, and Pharaoh’s daughter with the rosettes on her shoes, and best of all she liked S. Anne by the laurel-bush, complaining to the sparrow in its nest that she had no child. Again and again had Philomène peeped over the edge of that nest to count the eggs, but the mother bird spread wide its brooding wings, and baffled her curiosity.
As soon as Philomène had had a look at her favourite pictures, she put away the book and wrote two whole sheets to her father. After that she began to play with Don Whiskerandos, Isolde’s black Persian, who sat blinking in the sun at his mistress’s feet. Occasionally he roused himself sufficiently to wash his front paws, which were like velvet tassels for softness, but for the rest he was sleepy and undemonstrative. Philomène had christened him Dives, because he fared sumptuously every day and took no notice of his neighbours, and she soon gave up trying to play with him, and went in search of Lazarus, the gingery stable cat. Lazarus was certainly as plain and as under-bred as it is possible for a cat to be, but as Philomène always loved anything which other people did not consider it worth their while to love, his very gingerliness and the bullet shape of his head cried out to her for affection.