ing so purposefully about the room. Then, looking out angrily from under the bed, he saw her picking up the shells. Instead of bending over from the hips, as a man would, she was crouching on her heels, deliciously folded down upon her haunches. This annoyed him. And how heartless to clear away the shells that had been laboriously arranged in a border round the doll house.
"Why don't you leave them there?" he shouted. Then he realized how impossible it would be to explain his feeling about the shells. They represented innocence, poetry, the hopeful imaginings of childhood.
Phyllis scooped them up relentlessly.
"Don't be a fool," she said. "You wanted these people here for the Picnic, didn't you? All right, we have to make the room decent."
He felt that, as usual, he had picked up the argument by the wrong end. Arguments are like cats: if you take them up by the tail they twist and scratch you.
"And another thing," she added. "You simply must mend that broken railing on the sleeping porch. If the children are going to be out there it isn't safe."
"I can't fix both these beds," he growled. "There's a bolt missing. Tell me which one Ben
