At the sound of the first sob, Mrs. Bagot lifted the comb from Lily’s hair and hesitated before turning to look at Margaret. She could not face it this time. Margaret was having one of her crying fits, and Mrs. Bagot could not face it, not with the Bishop coming. She felt she was very tired, and she thought resentfully that the Bishop could have chosen another day for his visit. It was always hard, dealing with these fits of Margaret’s. It wasn’t so much that it was hard as that it took time, first to calm her down and then to get her into bed so that she could sleep until her exhaustion lifted and she began to look like her normal self again, her normal pretty little self that everyone admired. Strangers in the street always glanced at Margaret, and when Mrs. Bagot took the children into town on the tram, the people sitting across from them always nodded and smiled at Margaret — at her pretty, anxious little face. Margaret had been a delicate baby and she was still delicate. She was born very thin and weak, and there had been doubt whether she would live until her first birthday. And now here she was sobbing her heart out in a fit of nerves that came only from her precarious health. School was a great strain for Margaret. She was always missing days at school, always having colds and coughs, and then she had a struggle catching up with the other children. And her balance was bad — she was always falling down and hurting herself. She was very small and light, not solid on the ground like Lily. This present outburst was the result of too much worry over the Bishop’s visit. The thought of seeing a real bishop and speaking to him was too much for Margaret. Mrs. Bagot realized, too late, that she should have kept Margaret home from school today. Too late. But of course that is what she should have done. She should have kept Margaret at home and avoided all this last-minute rushing and fussing with their hair. In an instant of sickening panic Mrs. Bagot saw all the mistakes of her life rush together to congeal into the one fatal mistake that had made everything go wrong from the beginning. But the instant passed and with it her glimpse of that original mistake, the fatal one, which she could have named if it had only stayed before her eyes long enough to give her a chance to get a good look at it, so that she could see it and recognize it and call it by its name and know at last, once and for all, what it was she had done that separated her from the wisdom she knew other people possessed. She could not deal with anything, and in particular she could not deal with Margaret’s crying fits. Well, the Bishop would be along any minute and there was nothing to be done now but reason with Margaret. By reasoning Mrs. Bagot meant that she would have to promise Margaret something, a treat. Mrs. Bagot knew perfectly well that it is wrong to bribe a child, but there was no time for anything now except a bribe. She would promise Margaret a day off from school tomorrow. Yes, she would keep her at home tomorrow and make a little bit of a fuss over her.