you knew as much as I do, it would be simply silly for me to try to tell you stories, wouldn’t it?
Her wonderful eyes gleamed and flashed straight into the round goggling eyes of the amazed Edwin.
“Upon my word!” she said.
Edwin said nothing.
“Did no one ever tell you?” the fairy went on, shaking out her dress, which was woven of the integral calculus, and trimmed with a dazzling fringe of logarithms. “Did no one ever tell you that the things that happen when you’ve done your sums right, happen when you’re grown up?”
“I don’t care what happens then,” Edwin dared to say, for the flashing eyes were kind eyes. “I shall be a pirate, or a bushranger, or something.”
The fairy drew herself up, and her graceful garland of simple equations trembled as Edwin breathed heavily.
“A Pirate,” said she, “a nice sort of pirate who can’t calculate his men’s share of the plunder to three-seventeenths of a gold link of the dead captain’s chain! A fine bushranger who can’t arrange the forty-two bullets from the revolvers of his seven dauntless followers
