“Now, Sara,” I said, “we will build a castle all for our very own selves.”

“Our velly, velly own selves,” said Sara, hugging her spade with ecstasy.  “A velly, velly big castle.”

“Very, very big,” I replied.

“A bemormous castle?”

“An enormous castle,” I said, starting to dig the foundations.

“Dat’s a velly, velly vitty hole,” said Sara.

“It’s going to be a castle, darling.”

“For Yaya to live in?”

“Perhaps.”

And Nannie and Aunt Woggles and Hugh and Betty and muvver?”

Sara danced with joy at the prospect, and Sara dancing in bathing-drawers was distracting.  I dug industriously, however, and it was very hot.  Sara looked on, occasionally watering the castle and me too.

“Not too much water, darling,” I said, “because it makes Aunt Woggles so wet.”

Sara subsided for the moment.  “Is it a velly big castle?” she asked every now and then with evident anxiety.

“It’s going to be, darling,” I said.

“It’s a velly, velly small castle now,” she said sadly.

I dug harder and harder, and it seemed to me that the castle was becoming quite a respectable size, but Sara’s interest had flagged.

“Aunt Woggles,” she said.

“Yes, darling,” I answered.

“Sall we dig a velly, velly deep hole, velly, velly deep, for all ve cwabs, and all ve vitty fish, and Nannie and Aunt Woggles?”

“A very big hole,” I said; “but look at the lovely castle!”

“Yaya doesn’t yike ’ollid ole castles,” she said.

I began to dig a hole.  One does these things, I find, for the Saras of this world, and Sara was for the moment enchanted, but it didn’t last long.

“Yaya’s so sirsty,” she said.  “Yaya wants a ’ponge cake.”

“I think you would rather have some milk, darling,” I said.

“Yaya’s so sirsty,” she said in a very sad voice.  “Yaya would yike a ’ponge cake!”

“Very well, darling; but don’t you want to dig any more?”

“No,” she said.  “Yaya doesn’t yike digging.”

Now was that fair? —­ digging, indeed, when it was the poor aunt who had been digging all the time.  When I told Diana of this she shook her head and said, —­ Betty, it frightens me.  Do you think Sara will grow up that sort of woman?”

“What sort of woman?”

“Like Polly in Charles Dudley Warner’s ‘My Summer in a Garden.’  You remember when the husband says, ’Polly, do you know who planted that squash, or those squashes?’”

“‘James, I suppose.’

“Well, yes, perhaps James did plant them, to a certain extent.  But who hoed them?’

“We did.’”

“Well, it seems to me,” I said, “that she was rather a delightful person.”

“In a book, absolutely delightful.  I am only thinking of Sara’s husband, poor man!  You see Polly’s husband was an American, and that makes all the difference.  You remember I told you of a man I met who in decorating his house wanted to have red walls as a background to his beautiful pictures, and his wife wanted to have green.  I asked him what he did, and he said he made a compromise.  I said how clever of him, how did he do it? and he said, ’We had green!’ You see, Betty, what an American husband means!”