Then She Shall Not Have It!' Whereupon Jane Will
Race Madly Down The Right-Hand Road For The First Time, I Pulling
Steadily At The Left Rein To Keep Up Appearances, And I Shall At
Last Realise My Wishes."
This was my inspiration.
Would you believe that it failed utterly?
It should have succeeded, and would with an ordinary donkey, but
Jane saw through it. She obeyed my pull on the left rein, and went
to Shady Dell Farm as usual.
Another of Jane's eccentricities is a violent aversion to
perambulators. As Belvern is a fine, healthy, growing country, with
steadily increasing population, the roads are naturally alive with
perambulators; or at least alive with the babies inside the
perambulators. These are the more alarming to the timid eye in that
many of them are double-barrelled, so to speak, and are loaded to
the muzzle with babies; for not only do Belvern babies frequently
appear as twins, but there are often two youngsters of a
perambulator age in the same family at the same time. To weave that
donkey and that Bath 'cheer' through the narrow streets of the
various Belverns without putting to death any babies, and without
engendering the outspoken condemnation of the screaming mothers and
nurserymaids, is a task for a Jehu. Of course Jane makes it more
difficult by lunging into one perambulator in avoiding another, but
she prefers even that risk to the degradation of treading the path I
wish her to tread.
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