The Trouble-Makers Read Online Free PDF Page A

a terrier, as she scented the educational rat-race:
    “Do you always have as much homework as this, Clare?” she asked, with monstrous sympathy “Don’t you get terribly tired?”
    Clare thought this over in her slow way.
    “Not terribly,” she answered at last, as though she had measured the word against some exact scale before rejecting it. “It’s just on Thursdays, you see. We have four homeworks on Thursdays, with geometry and Latin. Latin always takes me ages.”
    “Mavis doesn’t have any homework at all,” responded Stella, as if this fact should somehow lighten Clare’s problem. “In fact, she doesn’t even have to go to lessons if she doesn’t want to. And the funny thing is, she finds she learns more that way than when she was being forced into it! Isn’t that odd?”
    The patronising cat! thought Katharine crossly: she doesn’tthink it’s odd at all; she’s just trying to show us how marvellous her methods are compared with ours! She was immediately shamed by the look of clear, uncomplicated interest which Clare had turned on their guest. Stella, too, must have been a little taken aback, for she pressed her point home clumsily: “Don’t you think you’d learn more, Clare, if you were at a school like that, where they didn’t force you?”
    Clare was silent for a moment, her grey eyes thoughtful under the tear-swollen lids.
    “No,” she said at last. “I don’t think I would. I think I’d mean to work, but I’d keep not doing it.” She smiled a little apologetically: “But I expect that’s just me. I expect Mavis is different.”
    Stella looked almost affronted at Clare’s total lack of defensiveness; her complete unawareness that either she or her way of life were under fire. Stella turned towards Katharine almost pleadingly, as to a fellow warrior who, although an enemy, did at least know that there was a war on:
    “Don’t you find it tiring, yourself?” she enquired. “I mean, having them hanging around doing homework all the evening like this?”
    “Well, I don’t know,” said Katharine evasively, picking up the iron again. “It’s not much different in the holidays when they’re hanging around doing something else. Or doing nothing—that’s the worst of all, don’t you think? When they have nothing to do.”
    “Well, of course, with Mavis and Jack that simply doesn’t arise,” said Stella, stretching out her long legs as smugly and luxuriously as a cat, but with much less dexterity: the ironing board lurched under Katharine’s hand and the kitchen table shuddered: “Mavis and Jack come home so full of interests and enthusiasms that they simply don’t know what boredom is.”
    “What sort of interests?” asked Katharine, with genuine curiosity, while she readjusted the toppling ironing board; “Things they do indoors, do you mean, like painting and Meccano and things, or do they go out a lot?”
    “Everything,” declared Stella with the emphatic vaguenesswhich characterised most of her assertions about her children. “Every kind of interest you can think of.”
    Katharine quelled her impulse to meet this challenge by thinking of interests so outrageous as to force Stella to be more specific. Instead, she finished sending Clare to bed—odd how Clare’s dreamy obedience took up more time and energy, more nagging and pushing, than all Flora’s self-assertiveness or Jane’s mischief—and poured out two cups of coffee. Stella stretched again as she took her cup—but Katharine was prepared for it this time, with a firm grip on both iron and board. Soon they were deep in a discussion of the manifold advantages accruing from a coffee-grinder—which Stella had got too—as compared with the superfluousness of a cream-making machine, which only Katharine had got.
    Stella was just in the middle of explaining that real cream was quite cheap nowadays, and that anyway the top of the milk was just as good, also that ordinary milk was really nicer than cream