Ollie in the tub, shaking her head wildly and screwing up her eyes under a wet fallen fringe of hair, rocked in the water and beat upon it unremittingly with her palms, until such moment as Roddy, standing by should shout the magic words “Peace! Be still!” when she became immediately motionless. And when Roddy was in the bath the process was reversed. But in each case the periods of storm were prolonged out of all proportion to the periods of calm, and Joanna came near to losing patience.

“You know what father said, Roddy,” she pleaded. “That on the night after your massage you must be early in bed, or it won’t do you any good. You know it is making your legs bigger and stronger already. Don’t you want to be big and strong?”

As she urged him she was thinking how like the Moons it was that they should pinch themselves, as they undoubtedly were doing – not to speak of Trissie’s working herself to threads at the laundry – so that expensive attention should be lavished upon Roddy’s delicate limbs while they allowed him night after night to sit up till all hours, and gave him his supper at any time between five o’clock and eleven. The wonder was that the child should show any benefit from this one-sided treatment. But he certainly did; and now with his clothes off he looked much like any other rather thin little boy.

“I like my massage,” Roddy was remarking meditatively in response to Joanna’s rally. “Miss Olssen’s fingers are just like jewels on my back.” But this observation, charming as it was, made him no faster in his deliberate washing of his person. And Joanna knew by experience that he would resent with all his manhood any offer of hers to do the soaping or sponging for him.

At last, however, she had got both the small, young naked bodies dried: Roddy’s stringy and hard, yet so helplessly tender; Ollie’s, petal-soft, yet firm as a stephanotis bud. And she thought how defenceless, how touchingly exposed the man-child seemed by the side of the finished, compact budlikeness of the girl baby.

“Tell me Ollie —” she asked while she brushed the child’s damp, short hair back from her forehead – fine, dead-straight hair it was, cut boyishly indeed, but so female to the touch, so different from Roddy’s mane. “ — Tell me, would you rather be a girl or a boy?”

“I’d rather be a girl,” laughed Ollie at once, but quite inattentively. She was trying all the while to twitch the jacket of Roddy’s pyjama suit away from him before he could struggle into it.

“Keep still, Ollie, do! Why would you rather be a girl?” persisted Joanna. She was surprised a little by the child’s readiness, and therefore doubtful if there had been any meaning behind her answer.