Elizabeth was tired of her doll, but she did not tell Aunt Anne that. She still loved the doll—in a way—but she was growing too old for it. She would rather have a puppy, only Aunt Anne was not fond of dogs. Then, too, Aunt Anne was never pleased when you grew out of your toys and thought them babyish. It was just as if she expected you always to be the same age and to like the same things. She wanted you to enjoy all the things she had enjoyed when she was little, and when you rebelled, as you had done at Cromer when you said you thought digging sand-castles was dull, she did not see that it was because you were growing up, or because you were “different” but said either that you were showing-off, or that she did not know what present-day children were coming to. It was useless to explain to her that instead of playing with a doll or digging sand-castles, you would prefer to read a book. She seemed to think that you ought not to feel like that; it worried her, and she disapproved.

She was never unkind; she loved Elizabeth more than anyone else in all the world, because Elizabeth was the only thing in the world that was really her own. Her brother was Elizabeth’s father, but Elizabeth did not belong to him. He kissed her before he went to business each morning, and when he came home he kissed her again and asked her what she had been doing with herself all day. That was all: he was not interested in Elizabeth, she was not interested in him. Miss Arden was glad that this was so, very secretly, but she would have been shocked if Elizabeth had told her that she did not love her father. She did not even realise that she did not want Elizabeth to care for Lawrence; it would not have been nice to face this fact, so she put it behind her and pretended that Elizabeth was just as fond of Lawrence as she should be. On the only occasion when Elizabeth had ventured to criticise her father, Miss Arden had told her that it was wrong, and that she was a silly little girl. Elizabeth never tried to discuss her father again; she had discovered that whatever you thought must be kept secret, because most of your really interesting thoughts were shocking and precocious. Only it didn’t make matters better between her and Lawrence.