Dora and a sofa had been carried out on to the lawn, and we were on
the grass. It was very hot and dry. We had sherbet. Alice read:

'"Society of the Wouldbegoods.

'"We have not done much. Dicky mended a window, and we got the
milk-pan out of the moat that dropped through where he mended it.
Dora, Oswald, Dicky and me got upset in the moat. This was not
goodness. Dora's foot was hurt. We hope to do better next time."'


Then came Noel's poem:


'We are the Wouldbegoods Society,
We are not good yet, but we mean to try,
And if we try, and if we don't succeed,
It must mean we are very bad indeed.'


This sounded so much righter than Noel's poetry generally does,
that Oswald said so, and Noel explained that Denny had helped him.

'He seems to know the right length for lines of poetry. I suppose
it comes of learning so much at school,' Noel said.

Then Oswald proposed that anybody should be allowed to write in the
book if they found out anything good that anyone else had done, but
not things that were public acts; and nobody was to write about