"I wish you would be sensible," said Robin.

"I am trying to be," I explained; "and I am also trying to put a
little sense into you. At present you are crazy about dancing. If
you had your way, you would turn the house into a dancing-saloon with
primitive sleeping-accommodation attached. It will last six months,
your dancing craze. Then you will want the house transformed into a
swimming-bath, or a skating-rink, or cleared out for hockey. My idea
may be conventional. I don't expect you to sympathise with it. My
notion is just an ordinary Christian house, not a gymnasium. There
are going to be bedrooms in this house, and there's going to be a
staircase leading to them. It may strike you as sordid, but there is
also going to be a kitchen: though why when building the house they
should have put the kitchen -

"Don't forget the billiard-room," said Dick.

"If you thought more of your future career and less about billiards,"
Robin pointed out to him, "perhaps you'd get through your Little-go
in the course of the next few years. If Pa only had sense--I mean if
he wasn't so absurdly indulgent wherever you are concerned, he would
not have a billiard-table in the house."

"You talk like that," retorted Dick, "merely because you can't play."

"I can beat you, anyhow," retorted Robin.

"Once," admitted Dick--"once in six weeks."