“Shall I write some more?”

“Don’t you write anything else ever?”

“I like writing ‘baby,’” said Margery carelessly.  “B-a-b-y.”

“Yes, but you can’t do much with just that one word.  Suppose you wanted to write to a man at a shop—­’Dear Sir,—­You never sent me my boots.  Please send them at once, as I want to go out this afternoon.  I am, yours faithfully, Margery’—­it would be no good simply putting ‘B-a-b-y,’ because he wouldn’t know what you meant.”

“Well, what would it be good putting?”

“Ah, that’s the whole art of writing—­to know what it would be any good putting.  You want to learn lots and lots of new words, so as to be ready.  Now here’s a jolly little one that you ought to meet.”  I took the pencil and wrote got.  “Got.  G-o-t, got.”

Margery, her elbows on my knee and her chin resting on her hands, studied the position.

“Yes, that’s old ‘got,’” she said.

“He’s always coming in.  When you want to say, ’I’ve got a bad pain, so I can’t accept your kind invitation’; or when you want to say, ‘Excuse more, as I’ve got to go to bed now’; or quite simply, ‘You’ve got my pencil.’”

“G-o-t, got,” said Margery.  “G-o-t, got.  G-o-t, got.”

“With appropriate action it makes a very nice recitation.”

“Is that a ’g’?” said Margery, busy with the pencil, which she had snatched from me.

“The gentleman with the tail.  You haven’t made his tail quite long enough....  That’s better.”

Margery retired to her study, charged with an entirely new inspiration, and wrote her second manifesto.  It was this:—­

G O T

“Got,” she pointed out.

I inspected it carefully.  Coming fresh to the idea Margery had treated it more spontaneously than the other.  But it was distinctly a “got.”  One of the gots.

“Have you any more words?” she asked, holding tight to the pencil.

“You’ve about exhausted me, Margery.”

“What was that one you said just now?  The one you said you wouldn’t say again?”

“Oh, you mean ’inveigle’?” I said, pronouncing it differently this time.

“Yes; write that for me.”

“It hardly ever comes in.  Only when you are writing to your solicitor.”

“What’s ’solicitor’?”

“He’s the gentleman who takes the money.  He’s always coming in.”

“Then write ‘solicitor.’”

I took the pencil (it was my turn for it) and wrote solicitor.  Then I read it out slowly to Margery, spelt it to her three times very carefully, and wrote solicitor again.  Then I said it thoughtfully to myself half a dozen times—­“Solicitor.”  Then I looked at it wonderingly.

“I am not sure now,” I said, “that there is such a word.”

“Why?”

“I thought there was when I began, but now I don’t think there can be.  ’Solicitor’—­it seems so silly.”