"Working on your mamma to spoil you like that, just because you're a couple of years older!" Nurse would say, pulling the comb fiercely through Alex' hair as she went to bed.
"Don't you contradict me like that, Alex. I'm not going to have any showing-off up here, I can tell you. You can keep those airs and graces for your mamma's friends in the drawing-room."
If Nurse had not been scolding her, then Barbara had been quarrelling with her. They always quarrelled whenever Barbara ventured to differ from Alex and take up an attitude of her own, or still more when Barbara and Cedric made an alliance together and excluded Alex's autocratic ruling of their games.
"But it is for your good," she would tell them passionately. "I want to show you a better way. It'll be much more fun if you do it my way--you'll see."
Their obstinacy always brought to Alex the same sense of incredulous, resentful fury. How _could_ they not want to be shown the best way of doing things, when she knew it and they didn't? And, of course, she always did know it. Was she not the eldest?
It was not till Alex was almost thirteen that her belief in her own infallibility as eldest received a rude shock.
It was the first week of August, and Sir Francis and Lady Isabel had gone to Scotland. The children were going to the sea with Nurse on the following day, and took advantage of her state of excitement over the packing, and the emptiness of the downstair rooms, to play at circus on the stairs. Emily only said, "Now don't go hurting yourselves, whatever you do, or there'll be no seaside tomorrow," and then went back to amuse Pamela, who was crying and restless from the heat.
"I'll tell you what!" said Alex. "We'll have tight-rope dancing. I'm tired of learned pigs and things like that--" This last impersonation having been perseveringly rendered by Cedric with much shuffling and snorting over a pack of cards.
"Because I say so," replied her sister, stamping her foot. "I've got an idea."
"But if you don't give it to me we can't have the tight-rope dancing," said Alex in despair.
"I don't care. Why should you do tight-rope dancing with my skipping-rope?"
"You shall do it first--you shall do it all yourself, if you'll only let me show you," Alex cried in an agony of impatience.