Poor Barbara, even as she concluded this ceremony, clutching her doll
close to her to give her comfort, could not refrain from a hurried
glance over her shoulder. He _might_ be---- But upon Mary this all began
soon enough to pall. She liked some opposition. She liked to defeat
people and trample on them and then be gracious. Barbara was a poor
little thing. Moreover, Barbara's standard of morality and righteousness
annoyed her. Barbara seemed to have no idea that there was anything in
this confused world of ours except wrong and right. No dialectician,
argue he ever so stoutly, could have persuaded Barbara that there was
such a colour in the world's paint-box as grey. "It's bad to tell lies.
It's bad to steal. It's bad to put your tongue out. It's good to be kind
to poor people. It's good to say 'No' when you want more pudding but
mustn't have it." Barbara was no prig. She did not care the least little
thing about these things, nor did she ever mention them, but let a
question of conduct arise, then was Barbara's way plain and clear. She
did not always take it, but there it was. With Mary, how very different!
She had, I am afraid, no sense of right and wrong at all, but only a
coolly ironical perception of the things that her elders disliked and
permitted. Very foolish and absurd, these elders. We have always before
our eyes some generation that provokes our irony, the one before us, the
one behind us, our own perhaps; for Mary Adams it would always be any
generation that was not her own. Her business in life was to avoid
unpleasantness, to extract the honey from every flower, but above all to
be admired, praised, preferred.

At first with her pleasure at Barbara's adoration she had found, within
herself, a truly alarming desire to be "good." It might, after all, be
rather amusing to be, in strict reality, all the fine things that
Barbara considered her. She endeavoured for a week or two to adjust